Dressed for success

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THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE Kids Headquarters CTO Kevin Downs faces in driving technology strategy for the family-owned apparel company is change management.

“It’s getting people to identify problems, helping formulate a solution, implementing those solutions, and bringing in a technology to strengthen it,” Downs says.

In the five years Downs has been with the company, he has seen plenty of change — mostly in the form of growth. The New York-based company has gone from $70 million in annual revenue to $500 million. It is the top importer of children’s apparel in the United States, distributing its clothing to Wal-Mart, Target, J.C. Penney, Sears, and Kmart, among other retailers, with licensed brands that include Disney, Sesame Street, Rugrats, and Spiderman.

For Downs, crafting an IT strategy to meet the needs of the growing company has involved a number of steps, but one of his primary accomplishments has been winning the trust of executives in an evolutionary process that has made it easier to gain buy-in for each successive implementation.

It has been a long haul for Downs as he moved the company from an old-style family business to a technically savvy global retailer. When Downs first came to the company, designers still used traditional production methods, few used Macintosh computers, and there weren’t many PCs.

“It was a tough sell because I came into a business where none of the senior executives had an IT background or a real firm understanding,” Downs says. “Most of the senior finance people looked at IT as an expense center. At the end of the day when we started having some successful implementations that the business was able to utilize, slowly the opinions started to change about what IT is.”

The apparel industry in general is an old-fashioned sector that has been slow to adopt new technology, says Geri Spieler, research director of retail vertical service at GartnerG2, a division of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. “I would say, if we were to quantify this, the adoption rate is under 5 percent,” Spieler says. “If we look at retail in general, it’s closer to 15 percent.”

But Downs has continued to make progress in changing his company’s culture around technology. A rollout of BI (business intelligence) tools that freed up hours of productive time in the last three to six months is one of the latest feathers in the IT executive’s cap.

With the old system, Downs estimates that, at a minimum, 30-plus employees pulled financial information from the company’s proprietary system and worked to deliver it in a usable format. “People could be spending hours or one, two, three days massaging data,” he says.

When the company started having data integrity issues, Downs and his team championed and received money in the budget to find a solution, leveraging legacy investments. They chose a solution from BI company Cognos to give users a true view of what is really going on in the company.

“Now [the information] comes with the push of a button,” Downs says. “There’s a certain amount of flexibility we give the end-user to massage the data if they choose to, and it’s made life very easy. It makes people that much more open for the next change process that we’re going to need to go through.”

Senior managers understand “that IT can provide solutions for the company, that we should be sitting in the passenger seat at the bare minimum for discussions they’re having in terms of what needs to be done for the business,” Downs says. “We want to be at that table, and we’re getting invited more and more with each passing week.”

Correction

In this article, we incorrectly characterized Kids Headquarters. The company is a global wholesaler and distributor.