Centric Software® is pleased to announce that Carina Wear has selected Centric PLM™ to drive creativity and propel future growth. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Founded in 1996, Carina Wear is the largest women’s fashion retailer in Egypt with over 200 stores and counting. Its overarching mission is to empower women with basic and comfortable essentials and prides itself in creating brands that deeply resonate with its consumer base. While the majority of Carina Wear customers are based in Egypt, it also boasts retail stores in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and has further extended its reach through its e-commerce platform and Amazon. The company is experiencing a high growth phase and has plans to expand into yet more countries in the region and potentially also enter into the men’s fashion retail market.
To support its ambitious growth trajectory, Carina Wear recently took the time to re-evaluate its core business objectives, strategic direction and operational processes. This set them on the path to source a best-in-class PLM system as a foundational pillar for its next phase of development.
“We have so many creative ideas and exciting initiatives in the pipeline, but not enough staff to execute on them; our talented designers were bogged down with administrative tasks,” explains Moussa Asfour, Deputy CEO at Carina Wear. “We decided to invest in our processes and people, and the right PLM to support both.”
In order to take Carina Wear to the next level, the perfect PLM solution must streamline product development processes, reduce unnecessary errors and provide access to real-time, accurate data across the business. After much research, Carina Wear selected Centric’s cloud-based platform for small and mid-sized businesses, Centric SMB. Centric’s impressive fashion and retail customer base, glowing references and vital scalability were all deciding factors.
“We just had to look at Centric’s portfolio of leading fashion and retail customers and we can see immediately that Centric is the market expert,” shares Asfour. “The second main reason we chose Centric as a partner is based on the human level. We could tell through our many discussions that they are completely invested in our success; the Centric team was exceptionally responsive, helpful and collaborative.”
Carina Wear has high expectations of PLM and considers it to be their most important business system alongside its ERP. It recently kicked off its PLM implementation and expects to go live in just three months. It anticipates a drastic reduction in time to market, high user adoption rates and an increase in the company’s overall agility—an essential characteristic in a highly competitive marketplace.
“We have two main KPI’s: to decrease time to market by 30%-50% and double our designers’ bandwidth,” states Asfour. “PLM is also a way for us to maintain the momentum that first drove us to this level of success.”
“I see our partnership with Centric as a win-win and expect to be a key Centric reference in the region,” says Asfour. “The way I see it is when the entire market matures and innovates, everyone becomes more competitive, and we all benefit as an industry.”
“We are thrilled that Carina Wear is our first customer in Egypt, and we look forward to a long, mutually beneficial partnership,” says Fabrice Canonge, President of Centric Software. “We are excited for its successful PLM launch and continued growth.”
