product-decisions
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Dan Leahy
Dan Leahy is the co-founder and CEO of MakerSights, a San Francisco consumer-insights platform that helps apparel, footwear, and accessories brands decide what to make before they make it. His pitch is blunt: the fashion industry still builds product the way it did in the 1980s, guessing at what shoppers want and burning through unsold inventory in the process. MakerSights collects consumer feedback at scale and ties it to real sales data so brands like Ralph Lauren, New Balance, Everlane, and Madewell can produce less waste and more of what people actually buy. Before MakerSights, Leahy founded Savored, a restaurant yield-management startup acquired by Groupon, and cut his teeth in finance at Silver Lake and Brown Brothers Harriman. A Maine kid who once mailed handwritten letters to NBA stars begging for autographs, he built a career on the same stubborn premise: ask enough people for what you want, and enough of them say yes.
MakerSights
MakerSights is a San Francisco software company that gives consumer brands a Voice-of-Consumer platform for testing product ideas before they are made. Founded in 2015, it lets apparel, footwear and accessories teams put concepts, line plans and assortments in front of thousands of real target shoppers in hours, helping them make fewer wrong bets and cut down on overproduction. Its newer MakerLabs offering uses AI-trained digital twins to deliver synthetic consumer readouts in under an hour. Brands including New Balance, Madewell, Champion, Ralph Lauren and Hoka use it to align what gets made with what people actually buy.