Qarma | Quality & Compliance

I often ask customers what quality means to them. This week at High Point Market, I turned the question on myself. After seven years of walking these showrooms, here's my answer: 🛡️ Quality is protecting brand equity. Every product carrying your name is a promise. One bad shipment can undo years of trust with retailers and consumers. 📉 Quality is keeping claims down. Returns, chargebacks and complaints aren't just costs. They're signals that something upstream needs attention, and the earlier you catch it, the cheaper it is. 🌱 Quality is a growth mindset. It's never "done." The best teams I meet treat every inspection, every defect and every supplier conversation as a chance to improve the process. 🤝 Quality is making products the whole organization is proud of. From design and sourcing to the factory floor and the showroom, everyone should be able to stand behind what ships. And nowhere do you see that in full force like a High Point showroom. The salespeople are selling what designers designed, manufacturers made, and quality teams oversaw. Every piece on that floor is the result of many hands, and the showrooms are where everybody's best work comes together. High Point is also where I've built friendships, networks and partnerships, and where the conversations about trends, compliance and quality keep pushing the industry forward. So, now my regular question back to you: what does quality mean for you?

Diversified supply chains shouldn't mean diversified quality levels. More suppliers in more countries means more formats, scattered data and less visibility. The answer isn't to stop diversifying. It's to diversify without losing control. When inspections, audits and compliance certificates are all collected the same way, you can use KPIs to see which suppliers actually perform best, and which ones to drop. How are you keeping control of quality as your supplier base grows? #QualityControl #SupplyChain #Sourcing #SupplierManagement #Qarma

Most quality problems are not quality problems! After 20+ years in sourcing, I am more and more convinced of this. The inspection was done. The defect was found. Someone even took a photo. And still the goods were shipped. Why? Because the report was sitting in a PDF in someone’s inbox. Or in an Excel file on a shared drive. Or in a WeChat message nobody in Europe ever saw. We do not lack inspections. We lack information that arrives on time, in one place, so someone can actually act on it. The same pattern shows up with supplier audits, certificates and test reports. Everything exists somewhere. Nobody sees it when it matters. I am curious how others see this: Is quality in your supply chain mainly a production problem, or an information problem? #SupplyChain #QualityManagement #Sourcing

Your QC team's job is to catch problems, not to spend 4 hours every evening writing up what they found. Teemo fixed that with Qarma. Reports build themselves as inspections happen, giving their team back the time and energy to actually improve quality. Read Teemo's full story →

Before adopting Qarma, the time chasing QC reports was ""a nightmare."" QCs were working overtime, spending hours manually uploading photos to spreadsheets 1 by 1. By the time they were done, it was possible that the shipment had already gone out. Now? His team refuses to go back to excel. Read Maker Sixty Four's full story →

I spent years as a Quality Director, including time working directly with one of Qarma's clients before joining the team. If I stepped back into the role of Quality Director again today at a new company, here are the three things I'd focus on first: 1. What type of inspections are we performing? 2. Who's performing them? 3. Where's the biggest risk? Let's break those down: What type of inspections are we performing? Most companies are still leaning entirely on final inspection, which means by the time you catch a problem, it's too late to actually fix it. There's a massive opportunity to shift toward in-line and pre-production checks, where you can drive real improvements instead of just flagging defects after the fact. Who's performing them? A blanket QC approach doesn't make sense. The level of oversight should scale with your supplier relationship and their defect history. Many established suppliers are fully capable of running self-QC, especially at the pre-production and in-line stages, which frees up your team to focus where it matters most. Where's the biggest risk? Start with the suppliers and products carrying the most complexity and the highest order volumes. That's where a single miss costs you the most. Nothing here is new. It's just easy to lose sight of when you're heads-down in the day-to-day.