Why I can’t wait to hear New Balance’s story at aim10x Americas

When a shoe “feels just as at home on dads in Ohio as it does on supermodels in London,” you know you’ve created a special brand.

That’s why I’ve always admired (and worn) New Balance. They’ve built a footwear and apparel brand that is timeless, stylish, versatile, and highly functional.

What began as a humble, Boston-born shoemaking company in 1906 has since exploded in popularity worldwide. Today, it has a truly global and complex footprint. It operates in over 120 countries and manages more than 1,000,000 SKUs across 110,000 styles, with variations in size, width, color, and seasonality. Adding to the complexity is a global distribution network that includes 76 factories, 40 distribution centers, and 4,000 stores.

Until recently, they managed this supply chain complexity using separate legacy systems for demand, inventory, and supply planning, some of which were homegrown and tailored to specific geographies. As you can imagine, this led to suboptimal planning, missed opportunities, sluggish response times, and rising operational costs.

The apparel and footwear company decided that being an industry-leading brand required industry-leading enterprise planning and execution capabilities across all of its major markets. Today, it runs demand, supply, and inventory planning, forecasting, allocations, and scenario planning, all on a single platform powered by real-time data and delivered through the cloud.

This is a story of craftsmanship meeting digital innovation. And this September, New Balance will take the stage as an o9 client for the first time to share that story with us at aim10x Americas, our new regional conference in Dallas.

What makes this transformation remarkable?

Apart from the sheer global scale of their digital planning transformation, what New Balance has achieved is remarkable for a few reasons:

• They chose to integrate a new ERP and a next-generation planning platform simultaneously.
• They completed more than 85 system integrations to replace fragmented legacy systems.
• They ran 16 rounds of testing before go-live.
• They transformed their planning organization with over 80 users across demand, supply, and inventory functions.
• They developed a comprehensive change management program to support process optimization and rapid training, which resulted in high user adoption and performance.

What’s even more exciting is that this is just the beginning. The full impact of the transformation, what we call “time to value,” is on track to materialize in 2025. The foundation they’ve laid will allow them to scale and grow with confidence.

What I’m looking forward to learning

I already know the technical side of this story because we supported that. But what I’m really looking forward to hearing is:

• What was the hardest moment in the journey?
• How did they handle change fatigue?
• What does planning look like now compared to before they started?
• What surprised them?
• What would they do differently?
• How are they tracking value?

These stories matter because they offer lessons that help other companies successfully complete their own transformations. So if you're a supply chain, commercial, procurement, or IT leader, I hope you'll join us in Dallas on September 10 to hear them.

New Balance’s story is one of resilience, a clear vision, and a remarkable transformation journey. As one of the world’s most respected brands, New Balance is fully committed to building the digital planning capabilities that will carry it forward into the future.

Major global brands don’t often share these stories publicly, so when they do, you want to hear them directly from the source.

Hope to see you in Dallas. You can register here.

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