Why We Go: Lessons from the Factory Floor

Why do we visit suppliers? Because some things can't be learned through emails, Teams meetings, or support tickets.

Earlier this year, we travelled to India to spend time with our colleagues and visit suppliers who use Delogue every day. We wanted to better understand their workflows, hear about their challenges firsthand, and see the realities behind the product development process. What we came home with wasn't just a better understanding of our platform - it was a better understanding of the people it's built for.

Closing the Distance

The everyday reality for fashion brands looks something like this: the simplest shirt takes six to twelve months from design idea to delivery, passing through fifty to sixty emails, across time zones, between people who have often never met, in a language that is partly English and partly an industry shorthand that takes years to learn. Every handoff is a place where mistakes and misunderstandings can happen.

Stronger relationships between the people in that chain affects what that process looks like. When brands and suppliers share a common language and a genuine understanding of each other's work, information moves more accurately, problems surface earlier, and the margin for the kind of error that compounds quietly across a whole season gets smaller.

That belief is at the core of what Delogue is built around. It's why, earlier this year, we traveled to India to spend time with our colleagues based there. Together, we visited suppliers, sat in on technical training sessions, and spent time inside the kind of daily realities the platform is built to support.

When most of your relationship with colleagues exists across time zones and screens, getting to share the same room and the same city becomes especially memorable. The trip was as much about making the most of the time between the sessions as the sessions themselves.

What the Supplier Showed Us

Delogue is built on the belief that suppliers are not the end of the product development process - they are part of it. Visiting a supplier in person was a chance to see what that looks like in practice.

Dibella India has built their business around a simple idea: that the people at the start of the supply chain should be treated the same as the people at the end of it. They work directly with small-scale farming families, cutting out middlemen and setting prices based on production cost plus a margin. What started with 270 families has grown to around 3,600. Their workforce is 91% women, 49% of whom are single mothers, and in an industry where attrition runs high, theirs barely moves.

Responsibility that starts before the product does

Dibella India is not solely focused on scale. What matters to them is the certainty and consistency behind every choice they make. They do not present this as a cause, it is just how they decided to run a business.

On certifications, they were equally straightforward. Documentation matters, but it doesn't replace ownership. "If you don't own the responsibility, you can always find a way to produce documentation, irrespective of how difficult the document is to obtain."

It's a distinction that matters a lot to Delogue. A growing part of what Delogue does is helping brands and suppliers navigate ESG requirements in a way that's grounded in real decisions, not just paperwork.

“Working with ESG in the fashion industry starts with collecting data at a scale that is very new to the industry. Data enables better decisions, transparency and compliance” Anja Padget, CMO and ESG Expert at Delogue

What the factory floor showed us

Working with multiple brands, each with their own systems and ways of communicating, is the reality for most suppliers. Dibella India was generous in sharing what that looks like day to day including the moments where things don't flow as smoothly as everyone would like.

At one point during the visit, Sreeranga pointed to a full stack of printed tech packs, physically attached to a file and passed between several people on the floor, each checking against the same static document. It's a workaround that holds, until something changes.

"Every season we will have at least five or six styles with the wrong button placement or a different color button somewhere, because somewhere it is hidden in email." Sreeranga Rajan, Dibella India

He was just as open about the systems some of their brand partners rely on. Static, custom-built software with no live updates and no two-way communication. Data entered once and left as-is. The people who understand the measurements and the people doing the data entry are rarely the same person.

It's a small distinction that carries real consequences, and hearing it described so plainly makes clear why better communication between brands and suppliers matters so much within this industry.

Why we go

Understanding what a supplier's day actually looks like isn't something you can get from a support ticket. The trip was a deliberate effort to close that distance. To see it firsthand, hear directly from the people on the other side of the platform, and to come back with a sharper sense of what to build next.

Dibella India showed how they work, how they talk about responsibility, and how clearly they can articulate what they need as a supplier. It is exactly the kind of insight that shapes what gets built next in Delogue, how features are prioritised, and the importance of the relationship between brands and their suppliers.