Information is Power: Assembled Brands Capital Leverages Data to Help Clients Succeed
Through continuous innovation and investments in technology, Assembled Brands Capital, an asset-based lender specializing in providing working capital to various consumer product sectors, remains committed to empowering fast-growing businesses with the needed capital to thrive in today’s dynamic marketplace. The company works with emerging consumer products companies that sell through both e-commerce and omni-channel platforms.
For Assembled Brands, innovation comes from the ongoing development of efficient capital solutions to tackle the unique challenges of consumer product businesses. The company’s focus on innovation in ABL involves leveraging a wide swath of back-end solutions to access real-time data for faster evaluations and underwriting. This approach enables the company to deliver customized capital solutions that precisely address the needs of its client brands.
Assembled Brands aims to meet its tech-forward customers where they are within the realm of innovation, focusing its strategy on how to best service clients, especially those in the e-commerce sector, in a meaningful way.
“We understand the challenges our clients face, and we want to use their data and information in a respectful way to provide the best solutions for them,” Michael Lipkin, CEO of Assembled Brands, says.
To accomplish its goals, Assembled Brands employs a multifaceted innovation strategy that includes both technological advancements and strategic partnerships to provide support to emerging businesses. Its innovation strategy is characterized by three key elements: utilization of technology, tailored capital solutions and partnerships.
The company developed a data analytics platform that it uses to access consented data and gather insights on financial performance, path to profitability, market trends and growth potential. With permission, Assembled Brands uses API tools from its clients’ various systems to pull their information into its own data warehouse. The company then uses clients’ data to compare to other companies in the same markets and develops a baseline for market trends and what clients should be doing to succeed.
“It’s like a continual feedback loop,” Lipkin says. “This process helps us feel comfortable with the credit and allows us to help the company know how they are stacking against their competition, on an anonymous basis, and evaluate where they can improve.”
Assembled Brands also has a product development team that works solely on its back-end solutions, with the company’s entire team meeting every two weeks to go through what’s happening in the industry and what’s new with technology. The team then strategizes how to best marry the two. The small size of the company, with just around a dozen employees, makes this process easy and allows everyone’s ideas to be included.
“We approach this strategic thinking with the overarching goal of making the best decisions,” Lipkin says. “That way, we can let the same goal flow into each individual’s way of thinking and come to the best implementation solutions.”
Assembled Brands also takes “experimental steps” with everything it supports. For example, rather than committing to brand new tools, it evaluates the capabilities of current tools to see if they can be expanded. Running small experiments like this can help companies and their clients evaluate what works and what doesn’t, which is how Assembled Brands likes to manage its initiatives.
“Time is the most valuable resource in all of this because you can go down a huge rabbit hole with back-end engineering and not get anywhere, but having a committed roadmap of incremental experimentation has been really beneficial to us,” Lipkin says. •
