In this exclusive documentary series, Maxim Sion, fashion entrepreneur and Business Development Manager at Bleckmann, shares his experience of building a brand from the ground up – providing valuable insights on the practicalities of making your vision a reality. In this episode, he discusses the challenges of moving beyond the start-up stage.
With the backing of an investor, a growing product range and orders flowing in steadily, Black and Gold was experiencing strong momentum. However, the brand’s infrastructure was struggling to keep up. As Maxim explains, a lack of integration between the brand’s website, accounting system and inventory management set-up proved problematic.
“You’re creating orders in the IT system, but it wasn’t matching our warehouse at that moment, so everything was manual,” he says. “We hired somebody for marketing, and she was 50% of the time working in the warehouse. So, after a time, it was getting too much for the team.” In short, operations were taking energy away from brand building.
Press play on episode 5 to learn how the team addressed this complex situation.
The scale-up dilemma: Building internal capabilities versus outsourcing
As the operational challenges became harder to ignore, the young brand faced a critical decision common to many fast-growing businesses: invest further in building knowledge and capabilities internally or work with an external partner. On the one hand, in-house facilities allow you to keep all your processes ‘under one roof’. On the other hand, the costs and time requirements of expanding your capabilities can be significant.
In the end, Maxim and the team decided to invest in new racking, a significant outlay for a growing company. However, this didn’t address the ongoing problems related to inventory management and workforce availability. It was time to widen the net and consider another path, one that would allow Black and Gold to re-focus on its growth.
Check out the next episode to learn more about Maxim’s decision-making process and how he unlocked Black and Gold’s next expansion phase. And, if you want to take your brand to the next level, get in contact for a free consultation with a Bleckmann expert!
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Transcript
Maxim Sion:
At that time, my commute to the office was around two hours one way, so I was driving about four hours a day. I left home at five in the morning and got back around eight or nine in the evening. It was very hard and left little room for a personal life. Even when I was back in my hometown, everything was still focused on work.
Before the investment, Black & Gold was a smaller company. Once the investors joined, the company started scaling very quickly, which naturally came with growing pains. One of the first challenges was IT. We had a basic website and a basic accounting system, but they were not built for a fashion company, which made things difficult.
These struggles also affected our logistics processes. Orders were created in the IT system, but they didn’t align with how our warehouse worked. Everything was manual. We didn’t have fixed locations for each item, so most of the work was done on paper.
During the scale-up phase, we hired someone for marketing, but she ended up spending about 50% of her time working in the warehouse. That clearly wasn’t the right focus for the company. As we kept growing, the pressure increased, and the situation became too much for the team.
We started looking for new solutions in the market and considered investing in better IT systems and warehouse management systems. We carefully evaluated what would be the best option to continue scaling the company in a healthy way. We did invest ourselves in new racking, which was already a significant investment for a startup at that stage.
However, implementing a full warehouse management system—and gaining the knowledge to operate it—was very difficult for us. We lacked experience, time, and the internal motivation to build that expertise ourselves. At some point, it all became too much, and we started actively searching online for alternative solutions.
My personal situation was a major motivation. Living two hours away from the office, combined with issues involving temporary staff, meant that as a company owner, I was always the one responsible. If someone was sick, I had to step in myself. It simply wasn’t manageable anymore.
Even the team was under heavy pressure. One team member experienced burnout because the workload became overwhelming. There was no longer a clear structure—people were spending 40% of their time in the warehouse, then switching to marketing, then to finance. Everything was constantly changing.
That was a very difficult period, and looking back, we are really happy that we made the decision to move to a logistics provider. That’s how I eventually came into contact with Blackman.
