I spent the last week of June in India, mostly in Tamil Nadu, visiting factories and potential partners to deepen my understanding of what they do and how they do it. My colleague Darshan met me at Coimbatore airport in jeans and a polo, me already sweating through my linen shirt. It was monsoon season, the sun wasn’t out, hot and humid, just as expected. 

In the coming days my perspective changed subtly - things I knew in theory or from video calls were confirmed, my understanding of our users and their work deepened, and a lot of insight came from just being there, in the room where it happens. 

Four factories over three days is just the tip of the iceberg, it pales in comparison to our founder Feico’s 30 years, but it felt like a step in the right direction and has started me thinking down wholly new paths for what we should build next. I won’t bore you with the whole diary entry but here are some thoughts.  

Data isn’t the problem

The first facility I visited was Katalyst, they did mostly cutting and sewing - a relatively small operation with five production lines of people. They walked me through their whole process from order in to product out. There was lots to consider and think about but perhaps the most relevant was that someone was logging measurements and doing QC checks at every single stage of production.

All of these ‘traceability systems’ or ‘brand required tools’, AWARE™ included talk a lot about data collection. Make sure the data is there, make sure it’s accurate, make sure they are collecting the right information. I think in my mind I thought the problem was that we were asking for data they don’t already have. But no, of course they do. 

Their business depends on the order being right.

I'd assumed manual data entry meant messy data. But no, it's structured, it's consistent, and the people recording it know their systems better than we ever could. The problem isn't collection. It's that we're asking them to leave their place of comfort (systems they’ve been using sometimes for decades) and enter information in a format or structure they don’t understand.

They want to be seen, not audited

Green Home Furnishings was next and the biggest, most impressive operation I visited by far. They have a live ERP system, and their team is starting to implement barcoding, not just for materials but to start tracking production line efficiency even more closely.

We were shown around a couple of the facilities they had next to their offices where hundreds of people were working. The factory itself was well ventilated, the materials and products were well organised, and I noticed, even though the boss was showing us around and it was hot, the workers were smiling, seemed quite content to be there.

Over lunch I asked the owner what she sees as the next big thing for her and her businesses, and if there’s anything we at AWARE™ could do for her. She was quite clear: she recognises the growing importance of EU regulation and the relevance of sustainability. Her brand is built around ESG already, sustainable materials, workers rights, working with industry associations, great. Her problem is getting her brand out there. 

Every producer said some version of this. She just said it plainest. And it again seems straightforward, these are businesses in rural India working on products that end up in the US or Europe, of course they want help with promotion. Not because they don’t have marketing and logos and materials, but because standing out when you’re a brand from rural India is hard without some amount of endorsement. 

The contrast that confirms both

Some of the other factories weren't pretty. Barely ventilated, machines running 24/7 in the heat, fibre waste built up and sticking to the walls because of the humidity - who knows when some of these places had last been cleaned.

It was easy to assume that means worse production or less capability. That’s certainly what I thought. Their operation looked like a mess so their data must be too.

But no, they tracked orders just as carefully - again, if they didn’t they wouldn’t be in business, and the people working there who I spoke to were happy and content with their work. It just means they have different priorities.

Every factory, regardless of how it looked, asked the same question. When does this get me more business?

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The final meeting

On the last day, I met the technical team at a potential partner that works with gins and farmers upstream of us. Their director has been talking to Feico for a while with good progress - I won't name names here as hopefully that will be an anouncement coming soon.

Their directorwasn't in the room for this meeting though, he was travelling for an event, which gave us the chances to get more technical. My understanding was they thought our system was ‘mass balance only’, and that we were doing mass balancing wrong - both of which aren’t technically true, so I was looking forward to the discussion and getting into the weeds.

It turned out they had two core concerns:

1. They don't like that we skip third-party verification - I asked why, and it was because they do do it. So we talked about how verification is easy to buy and becomes an unhelpful black box, that we build for verifiability - anyone can check the records themselves. 
2. They dislike that we let users input their own waste numbers per process - calling it weak mass balancing. I gave the same answer: we're not claiming infallibility, we're making it visible enough that dishonesty is exposed.

In the other meetings, through questions and demonstrations I was able to uncover my misunderstandings. This time I went in expecting to discuss the concepts of mass balancing and chain of custody - because maybe I am missing something - and instead was met with concerns that felt like they were about principles rather than technicals. Not things I didn't understand but things we didn't' see eye to eye on.

The difficulty was I wasn't there to talk about ‘the right way’, that's more for their director and Feico to discuss. I was there to talk about how we can work together. I don’t want to convince them to do it our way, and doing it their way would break the premise of AWARE™, so, the question becomes can we manage to work together regardless? Can we pass their information into our system and serve our users effectively? I think the answer will be yes.

They've been working on their platform, and in the industry, for many decades. They know what they're doing and they do it well. Discussing with them in this meeting, and having the opportunity to potentially work together, is a serious privilege and learning opportunity. The discussions will continue, we think good things will come of it, and I'm hopeful that this was the start of many more technical discussions in the future.

Close

Two things are clearer now than before the trip. We should be building the pipeline that compliments what factories already have - instead of asking them to re-enter it. And we should build something that lets them show off what they're doing, because ‘traceability’ is only valuable to them when someone can ‘trace’ a good product back to them.

If you’re interested in following along with what changes from this trip head over to our documentation platform where I keep our public roadmap. If you want to discuss something, that’s where I’ll be. 

Thanks Dharsan for being a great chauffeur, translator, collaborator, and restaurant recommender - next time we’ll start in Bangalore, much closer to home.