2023-Management-Vividly

ALEXANDER WHATLEY: Hi, everyone. How's it going. I'm Alex. I'm the CEO Vividly, and I'm really excited today to talk to you about how we help consumer good brands manage trade promotions in retail. And I'd like to first extend a special thank you to Katarina and the entire MIT ILP group for hosting this event. So let's get started. So first of all, what is this core problem of trade promotion management that we're solving? I'd like to dive into it a little bit. So across the world, there's about $4 trillion being spent in consumer goods worldwide. And I'm talking about fast moving goods like food and beverage, beauty and cosmetics, vitamins, and so forth.

And about 20% of all this revenue is spent inside in store marketing activities that is generally referred to as trade spend. So if you're in a store, you've definitely seen this firsthand. It's the discount tags you see on shelves like 20% off or buy one get one free. It's the displays of items that you see when you first enter the stores, and there's also things like free sample stations and so forth. So the brands-- the manufacturers will pay the retailers this amount of money for them to run these in-store activities to get consumers hooked on their items and to sell faster. And trade promotion creates a lot of downstream headaches for the brands that can cost them millionths of a year if they're not careful with it-- ranging from not being able to plan inventory effectively because they increase the amount of sales that go on in the store all the way to invalid billing that comes to the brands, which can cost them millions a year.

And then finally, their sales staff will oftentimes-- if they're not using a digitized system-- spend many, many additional hours managing the process in Excel, which creates additional headcount difficulties for the brands that are already very short staffed and have low margins. And so this is really where Vividly comes in. And the problem is being exacerbated today because of all of the issues that we're seeing in the economy, such as inflation, the supply chain difficulties. There's still a lack of talent in many industries, retail being a big one. And then finally, a lot of consumers are being more sensitive to price than before. And as a result, the way that these companies spend money and invest in trade dollars is becoming more important than ever. And that's why we teamed up to build a solution for this industry that solves the core problems.

So myself and my co-founder, who is an MIT alum, teamed up with two veterans who work in the CPG space to build out a software tool that can help the brands digitize and manage this process. And what exactly does Vividly do today? So we help the CPG brands manage trade budgeting and ROI analytics and forecast the amount that they are spending in stores. And then we can also serve as a CRM system where they're entering campaigns that they're running. And then finally, we help them with reconciling the invoices and receipts that they get from the retail stores that they partner with. And we help them dispute any invalid billing that they get from these stores as well.

And then we see ourselves expanding into the CPG industry's definitive operating system over the years because trade promotion is the core operating workflow that these companies have. But it touches pretty much everything else from payments that they're making to and from retailers to being able to finance the inventory that they need-- because this industry has a tough cash conversion cycle-- and then all the way to managing other parts of the process like optimizing the pricing that they're running at stores, optimizing the promotions are running. And then finally, optimizing the assortments of products that they're selling as well. And one case study that we have is with one of our first customers, Perfect Snacks. They're a relatively large protein bar manufacturer that's now owned by Mondelez.

So they used us for all of their planning and forecasting needs last year. And we were able to save them over $1,000,000 by helping them identify a bunch of deals that were running over statement over the past year. And through using our forecasting tool, they were able to catch and make much more accurate the amount of the products they were shipping to each retailer. And they were able to save over 20% on manufacturing costs. And then we work with a very large roster of clients today. We work with about 100 customers, primarily in the food and beverage space, but we are looking to expand and service a wider range of the industry. And for our partnership ask today, we generally have three.

So the first one is that we would like to continue to really expand our go-to-market motion among our core customer base, which is food and beverage CPG brands doing 10 million plus in revenue. And we'd also like to expand into other categories, namely enterprise CPG companies like maybe a Kellogg's or Coca-Cola and then partner with someone there to really build out our enterprise tier and serve as a pilot. And then on the buyer side, we'd also like to team up with people working in other industries that work with consumer good brands such as retailers and distributors as they also face similar pain points around trade promotion management.

And we'd like to team up with them on a product discovery and also a joint go to market partnership. And then on the tech side, what we found out is that the more data that's ingested into our platform, the more powerful and stickier our platform is and the more powerful the data providers platform is. And so we'd like to talk to any companies that provide data to CPG brands or Tech Enablement solutions so that we can partner together. And that's it for my presentation. I'll be around at my booth afterwards to chat with any of you guys if you're interested. Thank you so much.