Target Distribution Bottleneck

Moiz Ali shares a story about how his team at Native bypassed corporate bureaucracy to solve a product distribution issue at Target.

"When I was at Native, we had these end caps for Target - basically shelving that was going to sit at the end of an aisle. They come filled with all the deodorant, we ship them, and all they have to do is take the box off and it's filled.

We sent them to Target and nobody could find them. A bunch of Targets were saying 'we don't have this.' The P&G person said we need to call the P&G Target team in Minneapolis, who would call Target, who would call their distribution facility - it would be 15 phone calls to find out where they are.

Someone on our team was like 'this doesn't make sense.' So we just Googled Target distribution facility in New England, found their phone number, randomly cold called them and said 'Hey, we work at Native, I think you've got a bunch of these end caps, stores don't have them, we shipped them to you, do you know where they are?'

They said 'give us 20 minutes to look in the facility.' They called us back and said 'yeah, we got them, we're gonna ship them out in the next truck.' That's how we solved the problem.

To the P&G people, it had never occurred to directly call the facility. Their minds were blown. For us, it was the most obvious thing - call the person where the problem lies."