California Apparel News

Someone might have said that fashion is not rocket science, but obviously they have not met Brandon Levey.

Levey’s company, Stitch Labs Inc., headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, recently released a new platform for its online inventory program that has a focus on the fashion business. But from 2006 to 2010, Levey was dealing not exactly with rocket science but with nukes.

Levey worked in a systems research and analysis group at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. He worked on a team that performed technical studies focused on managing domestic nuclear risks of counter-terrorism strategies, nonproliferation and other government programs for the Department of Energy.

The Sandia work might have seemed like something from an action movie, but there were shades of comic relief too. “At any national lab you have a good mix of smart, eccentric people,” he said. “Everyone had a variety of things that they were interested in. Everyone had a serious hobby.”

His hobby happened to be making organic T-shirts and other apparel for his fashion label, Naked Cotton, which stopped production in 2009.

In 2008, this scientist exhibited the Naked Cotton line at the Pooltradeshow and was aghast that the other Pool exhibitors worked with such flimsy ways to record their sales and listed their inventory. These entrepreneurs would take orders worth thousands of dollars and record it all on yellow Post-it notes or perhaps with a fossil from mid-20th-century offices—carbon paper.

The scientist and tech aficionado in Levey tried to understand how his colleagues at the trade show worked.

“You keep this yellow paper for six months?” Levey asked his neighbor using a system of placing orders on carbon paper and saving them in a manila folder. “Yeah, I hope I don’t lose it,” the neighbor was said to have answered nonchalantly.

Levey thought that there had to be a better way for fashion companies to organize their books and their inventory. In 2010, he introduced Stitch Labs. He built an inventory platform, called Stitch, which delivers programs for customer and supplier management for small businesses, as well as sales history. According to a Stitch Lab statement, valuable time can be saved and better control of inventory can increase clients’ sales.

The first iteration of the platform was for micro to small product-based businesses, not limited to fashion, according to Levey, who said fashion companies were one of the verticals that found a lot of alignment with Stitch.

The recently released upgrade to the Stitch Labs platform increases the program’s “scalability” and is intended to be used by the emerging fashion companies, as well as more established businesses that perform tens of thousands of transactions each month.

The new platform will offer forecasting reports, purchasing automation and enhanced ability to deal with multiple sales channels such as Amazon, Square, eBay, PayPal and Shopify.

“It is a holistic approach to commerce,” Levey said. “Our systems allow for businesses to seamlessly manage all ways they sell their goods, with an easy-to-use modern user interface built for teams,” he said.

And as for the connection between fashion and working with nukes? “We are able to use similar advanced systems analysis approaches to understand the world of commerce and make sense of the data in such a way that provides real value for our customers,” he said.