Sabina Lopez-Vergara, chief commercial officer at Ninja Van, continues to redefine the role of women leaders in logistics.
Donning the uniform, she proved that in a very competitive world where men rule, a woman need not be androgenous nor engage in a testosterone showdown to be on top of things.
Departing from the traditional impressions and expectations that women should be as bold and manful as her male counterpart, she managed to remain who she is while improving on her core competencies.
Coming from a string of fab jobs at Zalora and HOOQ, among others, the former fashion and creatives executive says the logistics space is pretty much “not a sexy industry”.
“It’s really difficult to do logistics. It’s super operations-heavy, practically a service industry. I came from fashion and video, then all of a sudden, delivery? So, how would that be something that’s interesting for me? First few weeks on the job, I regretted accepting the offer. I remembered I have to explain over and over why it is called Ninja Van. Why not something that says express? But I guess that’s what the brand is all about,” she said.
“We wanted to bring something different to the table across all of the traditional logistics players in the Philippines. We wanted something more fun. We wanted something people would really remember. And something that would be a brand and not just three letters or two letters and numbers. We want to be known as express logistics provider,” she said.
It took a good many and lengthy chats with long-time friend and former co-worker Martin Cu, country head of Ninja Van in the Philippines, before she tested the waters and instantly regretted her decision after three weeks on the job.
Determined to make her mark in a male-dominated world, without a clue on how a courier company operates, Lopez-Vergara persisted to learn the job, beat the odds and learned to acclimatize herself to fit into her new shoes as Ninja Van sales head.
Time, she noted, has a good way of coming to terms with reality versus expectations. Seven years passed and she’s now one of the guys.
Learning by experience has humbled Ninja Van’s CCO—from hailing Grab and riding Angkas—she tried all these public means of logistics to visit sellers door-to-door.
Going back during the initial few years of Ninja Van, there were only eight members of the company including her one-woman sales team. Promotion came during the pandemic, as the company recognized her as the new chief commercial officer.
Before Ninja Van, Lopez-Vergara had several offers which she rejected, after seriously considering the courier firm’s offer and prepped-up herself to face logistics challenges. For her, Ninja Van is an irresistible challenge.
“At that time I was turning 30, still young, but obviously at a time when I ask myself where can I contribute more. Did I want to be a part of a big corporation where I just be like anybody else or did I want to do something that I would be recognized? With Ninja Van, I know Martin and I trusted him and I trusted the culture. They talk to me about how they would want to grow the business, how they are really open about their plans. At one point, it’s not the offer anymore, I felt I wanted to grow, to be the woman in logistics and I was the only woman then,” she said.
Having served various leadership roles, Lopez-Vergara is drawn to a man’s world where decision making is now shared by the womankind.
By virtue of gender parity, she encourages women to take on a man’s role and not end up as another cog in the wheel. The only woman at the helm of Ninja Van manages about seven teams, depending on the number of initiatives the company is actually working on.
Before rising as a leading logistics service provider, Ninja Van was renting an apartment in Acacia Estates in Pasig City and moved in to a co-working space in Makati after Lopez-Vergara joined the company. Today, the company occupies 7,000 square feet of space for operations, including the company offices in Paseo Center in Makati and about 300 offices and hubs nationwide.
Lopez-Vergara admitted that the pandemic has been good to people in logistics and many capitalized on this as micro logistics companies set-up their own fleet of two to five riders.
“Many have put up mom-and-pop logistics units. That really exploded during the pandemic. But the difference with Ninja Van is that we’re a tech and data-enabled provider. Our technologies are mostly in-house, built by our team. So we’re able to customize and build the specific needs given to us by clients. We are careful during the pandemic for letting people try online ordering, and that really helped us grow,” she said.
An online-first company, Ninja Van has a solid digital interface with real time monitoring and updates, taking delivery as a serious business even doing same-day deliveries to select areas, at the moment.
With 3,500 riders, Ninja Van has reached even the remotest of islands and even delivers on foot if the paths are impassable to two-wheeled vehicles. The riders are mostly men as the job description is not at all attractive to the female worker.
Keeping the momentum stable, Ninja Van has served 21 million people nationwide and continues to be committed to bump the figures and innovate some more to reach more and more shoppers.
However, the courier service said it also possible some of those served are repeat buyers from the same stores or from other merchants. Despite this, the delivery volume, which may have served the same clients over, is still a huge number that makes Ninja Van one of the leading logistics service providers in the Philippines.
Ninja Van also works with agencies providing support for nationwide logistics especially for big events and campaigns that are seasonal. The collaboration makes it easy for Ninja Van to source out a special delivery team to add to its current rider population for a period of time.
“These are peak periods. We need to increase capacities exponentially for a short period, maybe up to three weeks. We need to expand capacities quickly. But there is also the need to adjust when volumes start normalizing again, say, when a sale is over. The volumes also come down. So you need to be able to be flexible with that. That’s why we work with our contractors. We work with agency providers to help us expand and be flexible with capacity,” Lopez- Vergara said.
“We don’t cross dock with other partners. We don’t work with other logistics firm. Everything is fully delivered through the Ninja Van system,” she said.
The biggest challenge the company faces, Lopez-Vergara said, is not the pandemic but the Philippines’ geological structure being an archipelago with more than 7,000 islands. At Ninja Van, she said, riders have become creative in their delivery strategies.
“It’s actually one of the harder countries to have a logistics company because you need to use multiple lanes—air, sea, RoRo ships. We have become quite adept at using unconventional means to deliver parcels. There was this one time that our rider used a kalabaw [water buffalo] to deliver. Our riders are used to bringing their motorcycles to ride the banca [small boats] to go to the islands to deliver. That is the level of commitment we have at Ninja Van,” she said.
Another challenge, which is kind of universal for all logistics provider in the Philippines, is data connection as not all areas, even in Metro Manila, have stable data signal. The firm runs on data signal and on the internet. For this, it needs to adjust and be flexible enough to combine technology and the use of traditional processes.
Nevertheless, challenges drive the industry to continue to innovate and get goods and parcels delivered point to point, door to door, no matter how and what problems may arise.
“So every day, you get to hear complaints from customers or from angry consignees. Like there should be something that should be picked up or delayed deliveries for reasons that sometimes we have no control of. That’s part of the play, and we’re used to that, without saying in so many words that improvements are coming along. We try to address as much as we can by doing better, by investing,” Lopez-Vergara said.
The latest investment is a 21,000-square-meter sorting facility in Cabuyao, Laguna. It is the largest automated hub and sortation system in the whole Ninja Van Group. With integrated parcel measurement and real-time parcel status connectivity, these latest sortation systems will ensure that Ninja Van Philippines has the capacity to fulfill the growing delivery demand in the country.
Ninja Van pretty much covers the entire Philippines at 98-percent reach. The remaining 2 percent are really far-flung areas, a bit more difficult to reach, but the logistics firm vows to continue to reach every nook and cranny of the archipelago.
While the logistics industry’s growth slowed to a stable momentum compared to the phenomenal output that haywired the industry during the pandemic, live-selling is fueling e-commerce and along with it, the logistics sector. The trending online activity has trickled to the Philippines from big shots like China which is a heavy user of the virtual platform for e-commerce.
Ninja Van is working with the Department of Trade and Industry to create a seller development program. A lot of the live sellers need a tip and tricks, the right education how to do online business.
Apart from being the lady boss at Ninja Van, she is a cool millennial mom to her teenage son.
“My son plays a lot in my decision making and that’s probably partly also why I decided to join Ninja Van because I wanted him to see an example that his mom works. That this mom can do things and he can strive too and see that working hard and having a family is not impossible. I want him to see that as an example and also see the respect that women now can do this,” she said.
Unabashedly and quite candidly, she shared she was single mom and had his son when she was still in her undergrad at Ateneo de Manila University. She eventually married the father of her child when she became ready.
She values family time and made it a point to always come home in time for dinner with her kid and husband. Whenever there is a chance, she cooks for the family. She enjoys watching anime with her son, try to do the things he likes or go biking on weekends with her husband for quality time together.
The one and only sports she enjoys playing is tennis, which she learned during the pandemic.
“I find it weird that I like to play tennis because my entire life I never exercised. I hate PE in school. I hate being drenched in sweat. But now, I’m addicted to playing tennis. In retrospect, I think I chose to play tennis because it is an individual sport. I joined some tournaments before, but I really like to use it to unwind from all the work that I do. It really helps me destress where all I have to think about is hitting the ball,” she said.
Admittedly, she’s a video junkie. She watches a lot of videos during her downtime—including make-up videos, girly stuffs, all things that are quite aesthetic in nature. She has a keen sense of patriotism as she chooses to buy local, like most of her make-up are local brands—BLK, Vice Ganda and other homegrown brands.
Getting more into the groove of logistics, she is also a self-declared true-blue online shopping addict.
“Coz once you develop the habit, you can’t shake it off. And it will continue to be here. You’ll see a lot more people getting to it. Mas marami pang budol na padating,” she said in a jest.