Mavi, a leading Turkish apparel retailer, had sales of $419 million in 2015, up 20%. Growth rates like these were becoming routine at Mavi. But, its path to growth was getting more challenging, and Turkven, Mavi’s private equity partner, was planning its exit options after seven years of investment. There were three growth levers Mavi could pull, but each involved selecting one growth path while neglecting another. Should the company invest in growth domestically or internationally? Should they change the price positioning of its brand to move up-market and/or down-market? Which type of brand value proposition offered the most future promise for brand extension: functional differentiation, lifestyle differentiation, or celebrity endorsement? Managers realized that these choices would not only determine the company’s short term growth trajectory but also shape the longer term value of the Mavi brand as it was extended into new areas. Teaching Note for HBS No. 517-075.
This case describes Ekol, an intermodal transportation and logistics company, and how it manages capacity planning. Its busiest routes linked motor vehicle assemblers in Germany and Turkey with many of their parts suppliers, but it had also developed key links in fast-fashion supply chains. It used combinations of land, short-sea, and rail routes to provide different levels of service. The challenge was maximizing utilization of its trucks and trailers, especially on key bottleneck links, in the face of unbalanced traffic. To address the issue Ekol developed a consolidation center in Turkey and a cross-dock deconsolidation center in Germany, its largest market. As Chairman Ahmet Musul and his team looked at ways to squeeze out more capacity, they reconsidered their planning model and whether they should build more consolidation/deconsolidation centers to optimize costs and wring out more efficiency in its operations.
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