Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, is pleased to announce that Indian fashion brand Style Union has expanded their partnership with the implementation of Centric Planning™. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell products such as apparel, fashion, home, footwear, sporting goods, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage, and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Style Union is a modern fashion retailer based in India that sells womenswear, menswear, kidswear and accessories direct-to-consumer online and across its own stores. In just 18 months since the opening of the first store, Style Union has expanded to 52 stores of average 8,000 square feet, with plans to reach 75 stores across 5 southern Indian states by early 2024.
Style Union implemented Centric PLM™ immediately upon launching the brand, aiming to start off with an industry-leading solution and a single version of truth for everything product-related. With Centric PLM in place, Style Union established a strong foundation for growth. However, with continuous drops of 150+ new products per week to a rapidly expanding number of stores, assortment planning entered the frame as the next opportunity for optimization and digitalization.
“We had foreseen most of the tech stack that we would need and implemented solutions from the start, but decided to wait a while to understand our planning process,” says Ekta Biyani, Co-founder of Style Union. “As we scale up, we need a solution to standardize and rationalize planning. Centric Planning was the missing piece. It fit perfectly in terms of what we wanted to adopt as a process.”
Centric Planning will replace at least a dozen spreadsheets currently used to manage assortment planning and merchandise financial planning, and will be used by merchandisers, buyers and regional operations managers.
“We will be able to consolidate and organize planning activities and improve visibility across teams,” explains Alok Dharadhar, Head of Planning at Style Union. “We are expecting to reduce buying and planning teams’ time spent compiling plans by about 12-15%. This is on top of the benefits we are already experiencing from Centric PLM, such as a reduction in manual data entry and errors, standardized color, material and product libraries, vendor collaboration and integration with ERP.”
“We are pleased to expand our partnership with Centric Software to streamline our product development, buying and planning processes. We look forward to driving efficiency into our workflows through visibility across all functions,” says Biyani.
“We are delighted that Style Union has given Centric a further vote of confidence with the adoption of Centric Planning, just a year after implementing Centric PLM,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “Style Union is expanding at an astonishing rate, and we are looking forward to working closely with their team to make their planning process as streamlined as possible.”
