Davis·Brio·September 2026
Sticky tape in my brain
Preseason, a softgoods buyer's desk looks the same in most retail offices. Printed boards from each brand's B2B portal, one per line, spread out and shuffled around. There is usually a sketch of the store walls and some handwritten notes in the margin. This is leading-edge merchandising in 2026, and it's how billions of dollars in orders begin every season.
Softgoods buys are visual. The customer sees the wall before anything else, so a preseason order is a decision about which pieces hang next to each other, and the board is how a buyer plans up front. Get the wall right and it sells through. Get it wrong and the season ends in markdowns. As a Smith rep for the past five years, I've seen it go both ways.
None of this was on the agenda when we jumped on a zoom with Kathryn Leach in September. Kathryn buys softgoods for the legendary JANS Mountain Outfitters, a five location retailer in Park City. The plan was just a preview and feedback sesh. I've started sharing Brio with retailers, because they spend more time on these platforms than our customers do.
Right away, Kathryn brought up Elastic Suite's whiteboard tool, and the next hour was hers.
"I'm printing whiteboards. This one is for this brand, this one is for that brand, and I'm laying them out asking, does this look good together, because this brand is supposed to sit next to this brand on the wall. There are brands that aren't on Elastic, and I'm making my own Canva of them."
How much time do you spend on that? (Charlie)
“Weeks, honestly more. I have them printed, and this is my little Bible for the season. I also have the store sketched out. I'm doing it with sticky tape in my brain."
Her wall is the whole world. "I don't want something from North Face sitting next to something that doesn't mesh." Winter is where it counts. Jackets take up space and make an impact, so she wants to see them next to each other before they land.
I can see Charlie getting excited, and I know exactly where he’s going.
Brio’s go-to-market
Our customer is the brand. But the people who use Brio are the Kathryn's (our customer's customer) who have been mostly neglected by incumbents. This is my bet: in wholesale, the brand picks an ordering platform and the buyers and reps live on it, so how well a buyer can plan, order and reorder decides how much that brand sells.
When we started Brio we decided buyers and reps are the people to build for, even though neither signs the contract. If retailers on Brio do their season faster than anyone else, they will demand all their brands use it.
This is the two-sided network effect, aka peer pressure with a password, aka the Brio win-win.
"Any brand not on Brio is falling behind, because Brio buyers order faster and smarter and they sell more stuff." Charlie, paraphrased from our first meeting in June.
Order first, then board?
Back to our call with JANS. I had assumed a buyer builds the board and turns that into an order. This would make sense, but Kathryn does it backwards, and the reason is her tool.
"I've started the order, then I go to the whiteboard. And I realize I have six white jackets in this order. The whiteboard shows me I have too much duplication."
“if I take something out of the whiteboard, it doesn't adjust the order. So I have to go back to the order, remove what I took off the whiteboard, then go in and add manual quantities."
“It takes forever…”
Two brands cannot share a board, because each brand is a separate login. "It would be awesome if everything could be in one spot. I'm doing a lot of this manually because I have so many different logins."
Somewhere in there Charlie stopped taking notes and started sketching. "A board on one side and a chat panel on the other. You type build me this, or swap in more reds, or put a bamboo backdrop in there, actually make it a pegboard, and the board shifts as you talk. All the brand's POP is preloaded. You can still click and drag, and it's instant and the whole order comes together visually."
Kathryn: "I mean it’s a dream” “Nothing like this exists today"
That was true for 6 more days.
Brio's AI Merchandiser will ship standard.
If you're a retailer and want to help us build the world's smartest B2B, drop me a line at davis@getbrio.io.
So cool to watch this come together on a call!
Davis