Meet Team Mochila: Kyle Dougherty, VP of Fulfillment Operations

Meet Team Mochila

Kyle Dougherty

VP of Fulfillment Operations, Philadelphia

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Start date‍

May 2015 - I started out as an operations manager just a few years out of college, and now serve as Mochila's VP of Fulfillment Operations.

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Hometown

Ridley Park, PA - just southeast of Philadelphia.

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First (or worst) job

My first job was dressing up as the Easter Bunny at the Springfield Mall. The bunny suit definitely was not comfortable, but I learned a lot about queues and customer service, namely that keeping the lines short meant happy kids.

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Later I moved away from serving as the holiday talent to managing the lines for the holiday talent, namely managing the long lines of kids and parents waiting to visit with Santa Claus at the mall - my first introduction to scaling up for peak/the holiday season.‍

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I loved the science of the operation, guiding the new Santa Clauses to study current toy ads so they'd be familiar with the season's popular toys, and getting parents to whisper to me their child's name before they got to Santa. These little touches made all the difference. Both of these experiences were really valuable in teaching me how to create a great customer experience and delight customers by running a smooth operation, and I’m grateful for the lessons. But the suits were very hot.

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Favorite sports team(s)

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All of the Philadelphia teams - Eagles, Sixers, Phillies, and Flyers, in that order. Being a Philly sports fan means going through each year in a vicious cycle of hope and despair. When one team lets you down, you immediately pin your hopes and dreams on the next one until they lose, and the process repeats itself with each new season and team. Living in Delaware County (aka Delco, a county in Pennsylvania outside of Philly), sports is just part of the culture. You can tell how the Eagles performed the night before by the mood in town the next morning.

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Hidden talent

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I know everything about movies and movie trivia, thanks to my dad, who fostered in his kids an obsession with movies from a young age. I’ve also played chess since childhood. And thanks to my day-to-day work at Mochila, I have a newer talent transferable to real life - I can now tell if a suitcase will be overweight just by feel.

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Guilty pleasure

Soft pretzels, obviously - I’m from Philly.

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Favorite kind of logistics project or problem, or a specific project or problem you’ve worked on or helped solve

‍‍One of my favorite problems I’ve worked on to date has been figuring out how to successfully scale a customer returns process. The first part of solving this was learning how to build and train a team that could quickly become experts in getting specific products restored and refurbished back into inventory using a process appropriate for the specific client and their unique inventory. Tailoring the process is really important: is the priority in a given situation to restore the item (eg, for high-value items) or is it about processing the item as quickly as possible? We want to be clear on that.

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And a key component of doing this efficiently and well has meant separating the work of our team between those restoring and refurbishing items and those managing the important administrative tasks of logging the return and putting items back onto shelves.

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Helping our clients to get returns right means facilitating an opportunity for our clients to really make a connection with the customer and strengthen the client-brand relationship.

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