No. 9: Suuchi Ramesh

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Ramesh is the founder of Suuchi Inc., a next-generation supply chain platform provider for fashion brands and retailers. The Carlstadt-based company provides end-to-end solutions through the entire supply chain, which is tracked through her proprietary software, the Suuchi GRID.

In 2018, Ramesh was planning to move her company to North Carolina. But she stayed in New Jersey. Through New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s Grow NJ program, Ramesh received tax breaks that allowed her to continue expanding the company here. The award also enabled the company to move to a bigger facility and hire across a team of designers, engineers, sales professionals, marketers, and supply chain experts.

Suuchi Inc. employs more than 180 workers. Ramesh told NJBIZ in May 2019 she intends to have 470 to 500 employees by September 2021. And she is planning to continue to hire for sales, engineering, and marketing positions. Earlier in 2019, Suuchi received an $8 million investment from Edison Partners, a Princeton-based growth equity investment firm.

“My team and I were super excited,” Ramesh told NJBIZ in May 2019. “We boot-strapped the company to this point. Having Edison come in has been wonderful. We are going to use the funds to build our technology, make it stronger, and be ready for enterprise selling.”

Kelly Ford Buckley, a partner at Edison, said Suuchi had doubled its revenue each year and would triple it this year.

“Traditionally in apparel manufacturing, the production, the design, and development of these clothing items take anywhere from nine months to 12 months advanced lead times in order to get them into stores or available on their website or whatever their channel is for the season,” Buckley said. “It’s a long, complex, costly process. Mistakes are costly because of those long lead times.”

Ramesh manages a curated network of freelancers, mills, and factories through the GRID that provides flexible minimum order quantities, shorter lead times and reduced labor costs. The GRID is also offered as a standalone solution to track brands’ existing networks to provide end-to-end visibility, real-time communication and updates, and data analytic reports for smarter forecasting and factory assignments.

“We are taking a service, making a product, and we have applied our digital stack on it,” Ramesh said. “It is not that I started off with that idea; it was in response to demand.”

New Jersey has a long history as a center of manufacturing. In a real sense, Suuchi Inc. demonstrates what the future of the industry will look like here.