Meet Mary Kate Kloeblen!

Mary Kate had an interesting start to her career — she was an industrial engineer at a 3PL. Working her way up at Tiffany & Co and then J. Crew, a role at LOLA took her into the startup world. She later became a Director at Cabinet Health and Modern Age.

Today she’s available to help brands with demand planning, analytics, and supply chain ops.

We asked her a few questions to get to know her better below.

She also kindly shared some of her hard-won learnings about S&OP here:

👉 5 tips for building a strong S&OP process

What’s something you’re Top 10% at as an operator?

I’m able to combine both interpersonal skills and analytical skills to drive better cross-team communication and collaboration.

What are a few of the projects you’ve led that you’re most proud of?

During peak COVID, the company I was working for needed to do a full physical inventory count. Our 3PL was experiencing staffing issues, and refused to use their own staff to run it.

So I called every staffing agency within a 50 mile radius of our DC to source the labor we needed. Then I found supervisors to oversee it, created foolproof workflows for everyone to follow, and coordinated the whole project from start to completion. We pulled it off, and we’re able to fulfill our finance team’s year end audit needs on time.

Another time, I was at a company growing 200% per quarter. Despite this growth, I identified that our lead times for most products were incredibly short, so we didn’t need to order as much inventory as we had been. I helped the company free up 30%+ of their inventory value by implementing JIT processes for inventory ordering and stocking, and by creating detailed forecasts with cross-functional input.

What kinds of consulting engagements are you open to?

I’ve only gotten started recently so at this time I’m really open to many options in terms of structure and short term/long term. Once I get a bit more experience under my belt, I plan on using my learnings to get a bit more structured here!

However, I am pretty laser focused on who my ICP is - I’m looking to support personal care and wellness CPG companies in the early growth phase (from pre-launch to $30 MM in annual revenue). I offer fractional work or value based projects in end-to-end supply chain management.

Want to meet Mary Kate? You can get in touch with her via LinkedIn, or at marykate.kloeblen@gmail.com.