Backpacks, Bus Stops, and What Really Matters: Back to School with the ketteQ Family

A few weeks ago, I stretched my legs by taking a walk through our parking garage at ketteQ HQ in Atlanta on an ordinary afternoon. As I walked past row after row of cars, I started noticing the same things over and over: car seats in the back seats, faded soccer decals on rear windows, “Proud Parent of an Honor Student” stickers, stick figure family decals, half-deflated pool floats stuffed into a trunk.

It stopped me for a second. Every one of those cars belonged to someone who had just spent the day solving hard supply chain problems, sitting through long meetings, and pushing our business forward. But that was only part of their day. The bigger part, the part that actually kept them up at night or made them smile on the drive home, was waiting for them somewhere else: a practice field, a school pickup line, a kitchen table with homework spread across it.

That walk taught me something I've carried ever since. As leaders, our job isn't only to build a great company. It's to build a company that enables our people to build great families, too. Those two things aren't in competition. When we get it right, they reinforce each other.

Why We're Thinking About This Now

Labor Day has a way of marking the real end of summer, even more than the calendar does. The pools start closing, the yellow buses are back on the roads in the morning, and by evening, the sports fields are full again under the lights. For most families, kids are either already back in school or will be within days of the holiday weekend.

It's a good moment to pause and celebrate that. Not just the students. The ketteCrew members raising them.

Every day, our team is doing genuinely hard, genuinely impressive work. They're the people behind Quintus, the AI colleague that reasons over any supply chain question and acts on it. They're the people behind polymatiQ, the agentic solver technology that explores complex planning scenarios and finds the optimal answer in seconds. They're helping some of the world’s most demanding supply chains plan and execute with a clarity that simply wasn't possible before.

That work matters. We're proud of it, and we should be.

But we've never lost sight of the fact that our team's most important title often isn't the one on their business card. It's Mom. Dad. Coach. The person who remembered it was spirit week. The one running the carpool line at 7:45 sharp.

Meet the ketteQuties

This year, we asked our ketteCrew to send in photos of their kids, our unofficially official “ketteQuties,” heading back to school. What came back was a wonderful, chaotic, heartwarming mix: new backpacks nearly bigger than the kids wearing them, missing front teeth, first day of kindergarten nerves, seniors who suddenly look like adults, and more first day signs than we can count, spanning time zones and continents.

Looking at this collage, you can see just how global and multicultural our ketteCrew really is. Different countries, different school systems, different traditions for the first day of school. But the same universal look on every parent's face: equal parts pride, love, and “where did the time go.”

A Culture Built Around the Whole Person

We don't think supporting families is a perk you bolt onto a company culture. We think it has to be the culture, or it isn't real.

That shows up in the flexibility we try to build into how our team works, in the way we talk about time off without guilt, and in a simple, ongoing reminder to our leaders: someone's ability to show up fully for a customer call is connected to whether they felt like they could also show up fully for a school drop-off that morning.

So to every ketteCrew member juggling a first day of school, a late night of typing math homework at the kitchen table, or a car seat that still needs cleaning out from the last road trip: we see you, and we're glad you're building both a great career and a great family, at the same time, without having to choose.

Happy Labor Day, and happy back to school, ketteQuties. This holiday honors the work. This post is for the other job, the one that never clocks out. Your parents are pretty amazing. So, it turns out, are you.