Behind The Tool: Jamyang from Centro Commerce

Hey Jamyang! It’s great to be chatting with you today about your journey and Centro’s growth. Let’s get into it!

Jamyang - let’s start with the background of Centro - where did the idea come from? Did you see the opportunity while you were both at Shopify?

Centro began when my co-founder Andrew Liu and I were roommates at Queen’s University almost a decade ago. 

After graduation, Andrew and I found ourselves building careers in e-commerce and retail. Andrew was leading the operations software team at SSENSE, a billion-dollar luxury retailer, where he was feeling the impacts of inventory first hand.

Once the pandemic hit, and so did the supply chain issues. As Andrew was struggling to find a solution for his work, it hit him — if a billion-dollar brand was struggling, how were brands managing operations with less resources? 

Andrew reached out to me to confirm his suspicion. At the time, I was leading million dollar go-to-market projects at Shopify and working with 7 and 8 figure brands.

It was true, there was a need. Growing brands faced thousands of dollars in risks related to their inventory and supply chain, without access to enterprise level tools and specialised operations teams.

Andrew and I got to work and Centro was born with a mission to reinvent inventory and operations for scaling brands.

Tell us about the problem Centro solves for eCommerce Merchants - after leveraging Centro’s platform, what do eCommerce merchants no longer have to worry about?

We help Founders and Operators at 7 and 8 figure brands who are smothered by the weight of their operations and as a result are unable to grow their business.

From a day-to-day perspective, they are flipping between 10 different spreadsheets to manage a big catalog of products or tracking raw materials across multiple suppliers and vendors. This leads to surprises that hurt their profitability; surprise dead stock, surprise invoices, surprise stock outs, surprise expired inventory. 

Centro turns brand operators into inventory experts. Using Centro, these brands can optimize their catalog of products with smart purchasing, track raw materials across every stage, and can grow their business without growing their team. The best part is they can do this in minutes with our smart automations and workflows and save hours of work from purchasing, reconciliation, tracking, reporting. 

On the surface, Centro looks like an inventory management tool and platform, but what are the secondary impacts of Centro? Things like cashflow management, simplifying PO management, avoiding out of stocks?

Centro is much more than an inventory management software. Centro acts as the control center for a brand's operations, helping them gain control and visibility over their inventory. 

We give them visibility on things like when they're going over budget with their purchasing, early warnings around spikes or dips in velocity for different products in their active catalog, and advanced notice on when purchase orders seem late. All these touchpoints tie into a brands inventory and cash flow.

How do you customers talk about Centro? After say 6 months of onboarding Centro, what are they most happiest about?

What we've heard the most positive things about has been our visual intuitiveness, control, and the raw material tracking. When it comes to visual intuitiveness, we curate a lot of the surfaces of the platform to create focus and simplify the work. For example, our dashboard is a pre-curated view to only show the most impactful view of a brand's catalog. Instead of overwhelm, we focus on insight. 

When it comes to control, we work a lot with the brands to find ways to connect their workflows better with Centro. It's the little things. For example, we let brands generate reports directly from the dashboard and instead of just giving a simple export, we let them name the report pre-export and we save a ledger of all these reports for later audits. Some of our users use these report features daily. 

In 5 years from now, where do you see Centro? What’s your ultimate vision for the platform and business?

Honestly, we want to build the most loved operating platform for brands. Something that brands feel is a "default" for their tech stack when they hit a certain scale to unlock them. What this entails from a product perspective ranges from deep integrations across every place brands do commerce and finance to smart automations that find brands cost savings autonomously in their inventory catalog.

Most importantly, we want the platform to remain intuitive and simple while holding all the complexity that is inventory and supply chain. 

And our last question! Who is your dream customer for Centro? 

We’d love to work with Kotn or Rowan. They have such strong mission statements and growth stories. 

For us, we’re deeply inspired by their dedication to impact and see a massive opportunity to align our brands.

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