Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: HugePOD CEO Joe Zhou (Part 1)

Joe talks about a gap in designing, manufacturing, and drop-shipping small run fashion merchandise.
Excellent offering from a Chinese company to fill a big gap in SMB e-commerce.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Joe Zhou: I’m from China. I did my graduate studies at Yale University majoring in History. After a short-term experience in a VC firm in New York, I came back to China and joined a startup established by my Yale classmates. In 2012, we launched a live streaming gaming website. It’s the Chinese version of Twitch. Then it was sold to a public company in 2015.

After that, I launched my second and third companies. It was a B2B clothing marketplace and an ODM supplier for international brands. Last year, we introduced this sustainable solution to US fashion retailers as HugePOD.

Sramana Mitra: What would be the most interesting for this interview is to focus on what are the trends that you are addressing. What are the trends? What are the pain points?

Joe Zhou: We launched our startup because we observed online small to medium businesses in the US. We see a trend of decentralization of e-commerce. Small business owners have had to get creative. It started back in 2020. As we see retailers dealing with the new normal, customers expect retailers to have fresh new styles.

It’s been fascinating to see how these have evolved. Customers’ shopping behaviors and desires have really changed. Working from home is now commonplace compared to two years ago. Versatility and comfort are two big trends that we’ve incorporated into our apparel.

Sramana Mitra: Your entire focus is on the apparel business?

Joe Zhou: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You are focusing on US clothing e-commerce retailers and you are supplying them with merchandise?

Joe Zhou: Yes, and we provide a SaaS-based supply chain. We help them to eliminate inventory risk and get new styles very quickly.

Sramana Mitra: Who does the design? Do you provide the design services also?

Joe Zhou: There are two ways. The first is we provide a design tool. They can do the design by themselves. We also developed a system of AI-generated content. We use algorithms to do automatic design. We can provide more than 10,000 new styles daily while we just have six in-house designers.

Sramana Mitra: Is this AI technology your own?

Joe Zhou: Yes, all of this technology is in-house.

Sramana Mitra: You provide the design tools for retailers to design their own retailers. Then you do the manufacturing and ship them the products.

Joe Zhou: Yes, all of the styles are produced from one piece. There’s no minimum and we support drop shipping.

Sramana Mitra: You directly ship from China or do you have a warehouse in the US?

Joe Zhou: We have 48 workshops in China and Vietnam. Most of the products are produced and shipped from China.

Sramana Mitra: Small retailers can order small volumes of merchandise from you and you will directly drop ship.

Joe Zhou: Yes, they just have to deal with the traffic acquisition and operations. We will handle the rest.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Do you have case studies of successful relationships with US retailers in fashion?

Joe Zhou: We work with many big brands like Steve Madden and Forever21 under the ODM brand. On HugePOD, we focus on small creators. We work with many influencers.

Sramana Mitra: If a small US retailer wants to order merchandise, they would go to the HugePOD to order from you?

Joe Zhou: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a particular style of clothing that you specialize in?

Joe Zhou: We focus on printing things like printed t-shirts. In the US, we have many print-on-demand shops. It’s more complicated if you produce printed dresses. We also have accessories.

Sramana Mitra: You not only do t-shirts; you also do dresses.

Joe Zhou: Yes, no minimum even for dresses.

Sramana Mitra: Is it casual dresses?

Joe Zhou: Mainly casual.

Sramana Mitra: It’s in casual clothing that you can do this small-run merchandise.

Joe Zhou: Most of the designs are done by our customers. We can have all kinds of styles. We just provide the platform and design tools. They just use these resources to make their own designs.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: HugePOD CEO Joe Zhou
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