Episode 9: How collaboration can amplify impact and streamline your retail journey

Amie sits down with Alita Harvey-Rodriguez, founder of MI Academy and Hack Games, and Jack Howes, Head of Funding and Partnerships at Homie.

They discuss the how collaboration can streamline operations, amplify impact, and maybe even change the game for your own retail journey.  

Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to Retail Untangled. My name is Amie Later and this is the podcast where we speak to retail industry experts and find out business hacks that have helped them succeed. You won't find these gems anywhere else. And we have some superb stories from the coalface, as well as helicopter insights from retail industry leaders. We all recognise the importance of innovation in this ever changing landscape. But sometimes, the best solutions come from unexpected places. Today, we'll be exploring the power of cross functional collaboration and how it can unlock real world results.

Amie:
Joining me is the brains behind one of our favourite retail events, Hack Games, and the founder of MI Academy, Alita Harvey-Rodriguez. We'll also hear from Jack Howes, Head of Funding and Partnerships at Homie, a Melbourne based social enterprise straightwear label that came away from this year's Hack with a winning strategy.

Get ready to discover how collaboration can streamline operations, amplify impact, and maybe even change the game for your own retail journey.  

Alita, Retail Week is over. Another one has come and gone, which is, it is hard to believe that it's been 12 months since the last one, let alone we've just had another one.

One piece of feedback that we always get in our post wrap-up sessions with retailers and industry is how amazing the Hack Games are. Now, for those that don't know the Hack Games and they're like, what is this?  Tell us in 30 seconds why you developed Hack and sort of, what its original purpose was. 

Alita:

So Hack Games is the only retail industry hackathon and we bring together 50 people in the retail industry to come together and hack on a, usually a theoretical solution for the industry and teach our leaders and future leaders about the innovation principles that we are lacking in the retail environment.

And this year we did something completely and utterly different instead of going with a theoretical problem that's facing the retail industry, like last year was around finding revenue opportunities within a recession, so lean innovation. This year we did something good and we didn't want to do theoretical.

So we went with helping charities and we're so wrapped about the innovation or the change that we've made this year by bringing our brains together, still learning the innovation principles that we need in order to help our real heroes out there, which is our charities.

Amie:

And that is, that is awesome and such a positive change. And we'll get onto that in a second, but if I can just hone in on the innovation principles that you kind of mentioned in terms of where Hack Games has come from, how does this type of brainstorming, hacking, and the innovation principles work together to kind of keep innovation alive, interested to see why you think it was lacking and where kind of retail can use this type of strategy or principle.

Alita:

Great. So I think it's lacking from experience. And also, um, from my experience, at MI Academy, we help, uh, brands to empower their teams to think differently than implement into strategic projects in the business. Um, and we wouldn't have a business if it wasn't for this, this kind of thing that's lacking.

Plus I've, went and spoke to a whole bunch of different retail professionals, like yourself, Amie, to find out what was really missing from our industry. And it all came back to the ability to think. And we have a lot of resources tied up in our business who are dedicated to business as usual. And all of that innovation is farmed out to agencies.

And it's a problem because it stops our people from being valuable. And if we don't have these innovation principles embedded and used with rhythms and rituals that are dedicated to our business as DNA, then we're not going to be innovators in our role. That's where people get bored. That's where they're moving on to the next new thing because you don't provide them or the organisation and retail doesn't provide people with the opportunity to think strategically on a creative scale.

Amie:

I mean, the problem within retail is due to more of a siloed structure. What do you normally see as the issue? 

Alita:

So there's a couple of things. Some of them are cultural things. We've always done things this way and we are strapped. We don't have enough time, but the realistic thing is that you're, it's the time that you're not managing it in a 80, 20 type environment.

So 80 percent being on business as usual and 20 percent being dedicated to innovation and strategic projects. The other thing that stops us, of course, is the silos will come up with a great idea in marketing, or we'll come up with a great idea in product, and those two aren't talking to each other, let alone finance being involved in it.

So things are really slow. Things fall off the cliff, new business as usual comes in, we get stuck in this reactive cycle as opposed to the proactive cycle in which we need to be adopting. So building cross functional teams is a really important part of the Hack Games environment and showing leaders exactly what they can do if they just think differently about the way that they structure their project teams.

Amie:

Okay. Excellent. And so in previous years, Hack Games has always had sort of hypothetical scenarios. This year, when you've done, you've introduced the charity focus, and this also means real world challenges and real world solutions. Tell me about how this unfolded from your perspective. 

Alita:

As a huge fan of capitalism,  I just feel like we need to do something else with it. There's been so much discussion around why do we need so many billionaires in the world? Is there a point where we can just start giving money back to philanthropic causes, and there's definitely a lot of that that happens. The reason why it all came about was because volunteerism outside of the workplace is something that is on the decline and we've got incredible people like Jack and our other and our other charities that do so much incredible work so much for free, and they can't afford to have the top minds working in their charities a lot of the time, because they're usually volunteers within their cause.

So.  I thought, why not use- a lot of people also don't use their volunteer days within their contracts-so what if we brought it together and made it really valuable for the CEOs and leaders of the organisations to say, hey, send us your people, we're going to put them in touch with some really amazing causes that's going to help shape a better Australia for everybody. And we're going to teach your people innovation principle and send them back to you stronger and better than they were then the day that they left you for this one day out to the Hack Games wild.  

Amie:

That's awesome. And I suppose, Jack, welcome to the conversation. Now, Homie has for a very long time leveraged e-commerce to drive both commercial success and social impact, which is amazing. Tell us why you sort of came to Hack Games and what you were seeking when becoming involved.  

Jack:

Yeah, for sure. I suppose I better start by just talking about youth homelessness as an issue, which is really why Homie exists. Because it's one of the most destructive and least talked about social issues that Australia is facing today. The latest census tells us that on any given night, you're looking at about 28,000 young people, so that's aged just 15 to 24, who are affected by homelessness. And that number, the sector will tell you, is probably about half the reality.

So we're probably looking at anywhere from 55,000 upwards young people on any given night who are facing homelessness. In 2023, 38,000 young people presented alone, so solo, to a specialist homelessness service. We have 17,000 young people presented alone, needing a crisis bed, and only 50 per cent of those 17,000 young people are able to actually secure one.

And no one has any idea what happened to those 8,500 young people who didn't get a crisis bed when they most needed one. The overwhelmingly leading cause of youth homelessness is family and domestic violence, which is a problem when you realise that obviously of those sort of 17,000 young people who are actively seeking long term housing, only 786 were actually able to secure it.

And that's just last year alone. When we're looking at the increased cost of living, it's just getting worse and worse. So, that's why we operate in the youth homelessness space. The state of it is, frankly, a complete disgrace. It reflects incredibly poorly on Australia. And we're doing what we can in our little corner of the world.

So, we run employment and education programs for young people affected by homelessness or hardship in Melbourne. Since 2015, we've supported about 2,500 young people. The number's going up every month. So we're doing a little bit in our corner of the world. We're a social enterprise and we're also a charity, which means we can accept philanthropy, which is great.

But also we're really trying to become as independent as we possibly can and remain in control of our own destiny and never be reliant on anyone else to be able to continue the work we do. So we're currently about 70 per cent self funded. The remaining 30 per cent does come from philanthropy donations.

Don't get any government funding. So it is still private money coming in, but we want to kind of move that needle. So we're always looking for new revenue streams, new ways we can, again, just increase that independence and self reliance. And that's really what we came to hack games with just looking for some new minds, some smarter people than us in the room to help us out. 

Amie:

Oh, that's awesome. And Alita, it's just so, it's so amazing that the model can support such a worthy cause. And I'm so excited to hear what the teams have come up with. Do you want to unpack? I mean, I, I believe, and I'm only saying this cause I've read the article on Inside Retail. So I can say, I can safely say that it has a B2B focus, but what was the solution you came up with and sort of talk me through the process in terms of how this innovation mindset and the principles sort of supported this goal. 

Alita:

So this year we did something completely different. Every other year we have gone about and created one problem statement for the teams to create their solutions upon. Because we worked with charities this year, every single charity had its own very unique problem. So we went down the road of creating different problem statements for each team. And without further ado, I'll read out Homie's problem statement, because if you solve this one little problem, then the impact continues to roll on. And this is where a lot of teams make mistakes. And a lot of innovators make mistakes is that they're trying to solve the problem for everybody as opposed to a really specific problem within a broader context. 

So here's what Homie’s was, the theme for them was optimisation and efficiency supporting Homie in scaling their B2B operations. The context behind it is, Homie have been testing and experimenting with expanding their social enterprise over the last six to 12 months to service B2B customers with white label company merch.

The B2B market serves as a huge opportunity for Homie. And we'll enable them to work at a larger scale, funnelling the increased profits into supporting Homie's mission with this huge commercial opportunity at hand, Homie is experiencing a major bottleneck, which is hindering this opportunity. The current process for creating custom merch is manual.

From taking the order to uploading mock ups, gaining approval is labour intensive, slow, and not delivering good internal processes and customer experiences. With two part time team members responsible for delivering B2B orders, resources, and margins are absolutely tight. And it is imperative for Homie to find a way to streamline this operation ASAP and enable them to scale quickly. 

It roughly takes Homie 10 hours per client for their order, working with approximately five clients at a time in the last 12 months, Homie has worked with 20 B2B clients and in 2024 want to take that up a notch to 20 clients per month, but it seems nearly impossible without a robust solution. Their problem statement, create a solution that streamlines Homie's B2B operations at scale with limited resources.

Amie:

Very focused, but also, I would think a big challenge. So I'm interested, Jack, and having been part of the team, where did you guys kind of start? 

Jack:

We really went back to, like, bare bones. And we had, like, very lucky to have an excellent team as part of Hack Games, I think, a way to definitely wind us up with the best people. 

I think it's, it's just reframing a lot of these issues, um, for people who are coming from a big corporate background with significant budgets. And it's just resetting assumptions about what normal is when the, when the first question is, what's your tech stack? And the answer is,  well, nothing it's, you know, like you're really, you're really stripping things right back for a lot of those people, it becomes a lateral thinking exercise.

It's not just what money can we throw at this? Because if it was money, the answer was just chuck a hundred grand at it, hire someone to do it. Then obviously we would have done it, but we don't have that  resourcing. So it's, it's kind of like, all right, this is the problem. You know what the problem is. You're having a bit of trouble, like figuring out what the solution is with your current resources. So it's just telling the team and being really honest and being like, there's no resources, there's no money. There's no extra time. We're not putting anything else into this. What can you do? 

Amie:

I think I need to understand, before I ask what solution you came up with, because I'm quite excited to hear that. Alita, eight hours seems like a short period of time to come up with and solve that particular problem. Where did you start? And what's the sort of the structure for these innovation principles that you build into the Hack Games? 

Alita:

So there are two  principles or frameworks that we borrow from for designing Hack Games. And one of them is called design thinking. And the other one is called sprint planning or, or sprints. I mean, you might've heard of these for rapid innovation. They're used all the time in Silicon Valley. They were actually started at Google for the development of what is now known as Gmail and they had 10 days in order to make this thing come to life. We don't have 10 days. 

Amie:

You got eight hours. 

Alita:

Eight hours. So there are a couple of parts of the sprint process that we don't attack, but we do get to the solution prototype, which is usually day three of, of hack. And then like we're still talking. That's a good 24 hours and we've got eight. So what we did was then borrowed some principles from design thinking and allowed the team to rapidly get to the point of, okay, we need to develop, we now understand the persona, who we're solving it for, what the problem was, where we want to get to, and what success is going to look like. We developed templates in order to help teams to rapidly get there and a bunch of exercises in order to help them get there too. So using ideation principles where we put time on the clock, only let people work or generate ideas for a certain amount of time and, this is another issue with innovation that we solve through hat games is that a lot of people, CEOs and things will come to a team and they'll say, give me ideas on how to solve this problem. And they'll go, okay. And they've got like, an infinite amount of time to do that. The CEO doesn't think it's infinite, but the team's like, I have no guiding light of where I'm walking or anything like that.

So ideation and giving people time boxes in order to develop ideas or solutions and do research can help to speed things up as opposed to just running at things blindly over a long period of time. And this is a typical adult problem that if we're not given time boxes that we'll just kind of run off with the fairies.

So the ideation and, and the frameworks that we use there really help it. So to answer your question, it's borrowing that from those two principles being design thinking and sprint. 

Amie:

And now Jack, how long did you spend on actually coming up with the solution? Before you had to present it. 

Jack:

I went pretty rogue early on and I was like, guys, I don't really care how we get to a solution as long as we do.

Alita:

So  you still only had eight hours. 

Jack:

Eight hours just to find the main operation for me. I think it probably took us six, six hours.  Six of the eight, and then not even that could have been four. Like we cracked on and, and had something like had the, like the bare bones and the structure. And then it's kind of just a matter of drilling in and like, and working out if, if our ideas were actually feasible,.

Amie:

Are they, what are they?

Jack:

It's nothing groundbreaking either, which I think is the exciting thing. It's really just about taking existing software we already had, it's just stuff like, which we're using like the full Google suite and just automating a huge amount of the process. It's just fixing stuff on the website, reprioritising things, just making stuff super accessible, very clean, like just a proper flow through of information and actions.

And again, it doesn't sound super exciting or super sexy, but it was just something that's kind of just brutally effective and able to be implemented as of, you know, yesterday, which again, it's exactly what we needed. 

Amie:

That's amazing. And people don't know what they don't know, but also we don't need to reinvent the wheel. So if there's things that can be applied through that kind of bringing people from different cross functional collaboration, if we can make that happen and you can see the immediate benefit, it just goes to show how powerful these innovation principles can be I suppose. 

Jack:

I think it also speaks a lot just to again, the team and Alita as well, just how, how willing people were to just embrace our actual problem and our needs and not like they could have really just gone and headed off by themselves and just built something super flashy looking that would have cost a quarter of a million bucks to do and might have taken us the next six months to implement and you know, that's a blue sky thing. We'd love to get there, but we will. Well, this is what we need right now. What can you do for us? 

Amie:

Got it implemented? Is that what you said before?

Jack:

Yeah, we're working on it this week, which is Very cool. 

Alita:

And this was part of the judging criteria. So there's a couple of things that was able to enable all of the teams to get to developing their ideas and really crafting their pitch and what this solution would look like after four hours. Cause we say eight, but they actually only had a finer amount of time of that in order to get to generating ideas.

So the frameworks that we gave them was called the ambition framework. So they're actually defining what ambition is and what success is going to look like. Who the persona is where the bottlenecks are, they went into using something called the creative code, where you look at what you've got in order to get to where you need to go, which, talking charities here, it had to be lean innovation. Then we went into something called the crazy eights where we designed so many ideas were spat out. Then they went through and voted for the idea that they liked the most. And then they went through something that was really important. Can the solution actually work? And this is the assumption busting framework, which is what is the information that we have that is critical to this, the success of this?

What don't we know that is a risk that we don't know whether this is going to be a success. And then they went into the pitch and solution design off the back of that. The ability to be able to implement was one of the key judging criterias. Is this something that the charities can go away and actually start doing to make a difference?

And that was a really important part of why Homie won because their team really, really stuck to that narrative. 

Amie:

Do you think that is the reason why retailers are currently struggling with this innovation mindset is that  people often come up with a lot of big ideas, but it doesn't have that real world application because it's phenomenal to say something, a solution like this, you've got brilliant minds in the room. You come up with something that is doable. It's achievable. And as Jack said, is going to create a lot of impact for the business. Is that where people are going wrong when it comes to generating these kinds of innovation and ideas for retail?

Alita:

There's a few places that I see businesses go wrong. One is that they don't take innovation projects seriously, or they're leaving it to an innovation team. And it's not really connected to what we specialise in at MI Academy. Which is incremental innovation. So how can we make small changes to impact tomorrow?

And they’re really focused on these big shiny things that really don't impact the customer or don't impact the internal operations today and tomorrow for the short term, and then they can build on those over time. Using simple frameworks like the ones that we use in Hack Games is definitely something that I want to encourage more businesses to use so that they can take things into incremental innovation, as opposed to disruptive innovation.

We're heading into a really tough time and we've been in a really, really tough time for retail. It's not the time for us to do something big. It's time for us to do something meaningful within an incremental innovation framework. 

Amie:

Yeah. And Jack, what about the process of sort of collaboration and creativity in this type of space allowed for such an impactful solution in your perspective.

Jack:

As much as anything, it's just being able to take a step back. It's so easy to get down in the weeds with the day to day of your work and being able to bring in fresh eyes from vastly different skill sets and backgrounds. You just get so many new ideas, new ways to tackle problems, you know, you have. So it was just, it was a really, really good day and it's exciting as well.

And it was one of those things where I came away from it and I was just like, this is the sort of stuff everyone should just be baking into their business.  Obviously, if you've got someone to run a day for you better, but so many of the principles, the things you can take to your team and and do internally, there's nothing stopping you from having cross departmental hacks. People get so fixated on, well, this is the way we've always done things, and maybe that works or has worked up to a point, but also what's the harm in trying something new? 

Having organisations just being willing to commit to. An end goal and try and do things to get there, whatever that looks like. 

Amie:

And I'm keen to understand. So two weeks ago you had this problem. You had hat games. You've now got a solution that you're implementing. What kind of impact, Jack, do you think this can have? 

Jack:

I'm hesitant to put, you know, exact  double figures on it.  Yeah, I mean, look, so homie, we run two major impact programs at the moment, and we're building a third next year.

And the reality is, like I was saying, we're still reliant for 30 per cent of our bottom line on philanthropy and individual donations. We'd love to get that to 10 per cent max in the end, by the next three years, um, it really wants to be that thing again, as a social enterprise, as a charity, but we're not relying on that, but we're able to use that almost as like  the cherry on top.

If we want to take a risk on a new project, we really want to push the boat out on something, then we can hopefully still go to philanthropy and say, Hey, we want to try something new, something radical. We think it's going to work, but we don't quite have the capital to chase it right now. Can you help us out?

But we want to be able to really underpin all of our impact ourselves. So  hopefully this B2B growth will really push you towards that. 

Amie:

Yeah, that's so exciting.  

Jack:

It's one of those things where it kind of makes sense to us because we're sort of like, well,  we make clothes, we're really good at it. We've got all of these organisations all across Melbourne, Australia, the world. 

Who are constantly needing merch for staff uniforms, staff days, all these kinds of things and they've got  CSR budgets to burn. We're sort of what, well, we can meet you in the middle here. You've got this money you want to spend. You've got this need where you can fulfil it for you. And you know that that money you're contributing is doing genuine good.

Amie:

We're literally two weeks past Hack Game. So. If this is the kind of impact that we're talking about now, I'm keen to understand in 12 months what that looks like and really see, Alita, it's going to be very rewarding for you, I assume, as well, just to see the level of impact that can come from something that you've been spending a lot of time doing.

Do you, Alita, see sort of Hack Games continuing down this charity path?  

Alita:

I definitely do. The feedback from this year has been incredible. And the biggest thing that's come out of so many people's mouths is I'm so glad that ideas are going to something good and are going to make a difference. And whilst it's been so much fun working on these theoretical hypothetical challenges. It's just been so wonderful to be able to give back and use our beautiful brains that we've developed and over time in retail to give this to those who really need it. The best part about it is we impact the charities, but the people that the charities impact.  What was really lovely, and we were able to do this year was one of our sponsors, instead of giving away merch in our Hack Packs, actually gave a thousand dollars to the winning team to help them to implement their solution. So a thousand dollars went to the Homie team from message media. And we were so grateful that we were able to do that. 

A big thank you to both Alita from MI Academy and Jack from Homie. If you've enjoyed today's episode, make sure you subscribe using your favourite podcast app. Don't forget to rate and review this podcast.  

Outro:

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