By Oyku Ilgar & Zoryana Zagorodnya, SAP

If you feel like you have been looking through “pink-colored spectacles” recently, you’re not alone. Since the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie went viral everything seems to be pink. It took over the red (or in this case pink) carpets, fashion brands, and social media, and has seemed to turn the real world into a Barbieland.

When you think of Barbie, one color typically comes to mind: pink. She drives a pink convertible, wears pink high heels and dresses, and her Malibu Dream House is painted in 50 shades of pink.

But who would have guessed that Barbie could somehow be tied to a global pink paint shortage?

There is never Kenough pink

The Warner Bros. set used so much pink to recreate Barbieland, it wiped out an entire global supply of pink paint and led to a global pink paint shortage. The paint company, Rosco, that produces the special fluorescent Barbie shade was already short due to the COVID-19 pandemic which affected the global supply chain for all goods, and it was also impacted by a 2021 deep freeze in Texas that damaged a lot of materials used to make its paint.

But it’s not just paint that’s the issue, it is much more than that.

As of now, the paint shortage is still in effect for the manufacturers that buy in bulk for projects. Especially when the market is trying to keep up with the pink fever, fashion, beauty and homeware brands are jumping on the “pink” bandwagon. Now you can find a pinch of Barbie everywhere, from a classic pink 1956 Chevrolet to a burger with pink mayo in Burger King. Even I recently got the Barbie bug and bought a pink guitar. And guess what, it was out of stock the next day.

Make sure your ‘heels’ are on the ground

In the Barbie movie (spoiler alert) Barbie, who lives in the perfect world, has to step out of her comfort zone and experience the real world, only to discover that “the grass isn’t always greener (or in her case pinker) on the other side.” And if there is something we learned from the movie is the necessity of resilience and of course the power of collaboration.

When the marketing world can stay all pink and covered in glitter, it is time for supply chains to take off those pink-colored spectacles and face the real world. As SAP’s Richard Howells says, “We plan in the perfect world but execute in the real world. And sometimes pink happens.” Well, I might have changed the second part to make it fit the blog, but the ideology remains the same. Supply chains must be wired to expect the unexpected. In other words, supply chains need to be risk-resilient.

No supply chain runs in isolation. Risk-resilient supply chains need to integrate design, planning, manufacturing, logistics, maintenance, and service processes. Connecting these processes enables businesses to have greater visibility across supply chain operations and act faster when the unexpected happens.

Am I ready to keep up with the demand? What happens if my supplier fails to deliver the pink batch on time? Will there be enough demand when the next batch comes but when the pink craze fades away?

Up-to-date and synchronized information is a must to answer these questions. And risk-resilient supply chains must forecast and anticipate disruptions, and, in many cases, avoid them altogether. Having this visibility allows decision-makers to strategize risk mitigation strategies, make more informed and faster decisions in the moment.

Life in plastic, it’s (not) fantastic

As our planet does not appreciate plastic as much as in Barbieland, the real world has been thinking “green” and sustainable rather than pink. We are seeing governments starting to disincentivize the use of unsustainable materials such as single use plastics. Europe is leading the way and we are seeing countries like the UK, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, and Turkey implement Plastic Packaging Tax to “encourage” companies to rethink how to design and manufacture with product and packaging end of life and circularity at the forefront.

Modern supply chain technologies can help companies reduce, reuse, recycle, and use reclaimed materials to minimize waste and adopt a circular business model. Businesses can track their carbon footprint and how much damage they cause the atmosphere and feed that information back to the design process to adjust their design and manufacturing processes to meet their ESG goals.

Sustainability is not only about how the product is designed. Companies are responsible for informing their customers as much as they are responsible for knowing where that material came from and where it ends up long after leaving the factory floor. Do I know where that flamingo pattern shirt came from? Do I know the people being part of the supply chain were treated and paid fairly? Will that product end up in the landfill, or will it have a second life?

Supply chains changed everything. And then they changed everything again. And sustainability, which is as equally important as resiliency, cannot be an afterthought for supply chains. It must be embedded into every process across the supply chain for green to be the new pink.

To learn more about why supply chain professionals now seek to transform supply chains to improve speed and sustainability, take a look at a recent Oxford Economics Research: “Building Speed into Supply Chain Logistics.”