Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What’s the geographical scope of your business?

Drura Parrish: When you think about our geographic diversification, it follows along the pockets of industrial production in the United States. So why have suppliers concentrated around where planes are getting made? Why have suppliers concentrated around where automotive companies are assembling and making things? Likewise, our distribution facilities within the e-commerce portion are located where we have the greatest proximity to those distribution points.

Sramana Mitra: Traditionally, a lot of manufacturing has happened overseas for American designers or American engineers. What trends are you seeing? Is manufacturing coming back?

Drura Parrish: This is at the core of a lot of our conversations. The macro trend that we’re seeing is that innovation, entrepreneurship, and company growth is occurring everywhere. Let’s just say, philosophically, where the Xometry platform stands is to be able to provide production solutions, material solutions, and tooling solutions where these production elements are occurring – so to be as close to them as possible. You’re seeing this happen broadly where whatever the supply chain is, people are moving closer to the customer.

We’re in Kentucky, or that’s where I’m located. You saw a lot of the automotive production in the 70s and 80s. In the 90s, things start to shift to Kentucky just for distribution purposes in the United States. That’s because the customer is there.

As we look at increasingly diversified SKUs, shorter runs of things, increased amount of prototyping, the importance of getting out to market, and testing these things, what you’re going to see is just faster and nimble systems aggregating wherever and however they can closest to the consumer or where the densest purchasers of these goods are located. It starts to become geography-agnostic.

Start to think about where are the best technological assets. Where are the best human resource assets? Where’s the talent for production? Right now, globally, everybody’s strapped for great machinist and great assemblers – tool and die makers, additive experts, and things like that.

The power of Xometry is to be able to go beyond geography and be able to identify, algorithmically, the best possible sources to make these things wherever they may be. Then on the commerce side, to be able to present materials, tools, and things to keep these manufacturers going with the same type of intelligence exactly where they are. It’s bringing both the product to the customer like on the end user and also the products to the people making the products that people are buying.

Your earlier comment about vertically integrated is so important. The 21st century is about best leveraging what resources are available at that moment and to use software in an increasingly agile and smarter way to find those assets, to be able to bundle them, and to move away from hierarchical distribution-based businesses. So we can deliver exactly to the doorstep at the moment of purchase. However, that might be possible even if manufacturing still needs to take place.

Sramana Mitra: Would it be fair to say that given what you do, you have a pretty good insight into the cutting-edge American manufacturing industry at the moment?

Drura Parrish: I think so. I hope so.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Drura Parrish, President of Xometry
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