Fashion technology house BeProduct is pleased to unveil a successful Product Lifecycle Management (“PLM”) initiative in partnership with design-to-delivery apparel company Stars Design Group Incorporated.
The culmination of a rigorous selection process, Stars Design Group (hereafter “Stars”) chose to work with BeProduct in 2017, and today the company has around 30 active users of BeProduct’s eponymous social product development platform, in offices around the world.
Founded in 2000, Stars undertakes design, development, and distribution processes on behalf of a range of clients – working on brands, private labels, licensed products, uniforms and other product categories, primarily in menswear. Through its client networks, Stars’ products are sold in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and the company currently designs and develops thousands of styles per year across its different accounts.
Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Stars also maintains overseas operations in India, China, Ethopia, and Vietnam. Through these satellite offices, the company oversees manufacturing at around 70 different hand-selected factories, working to ensure that quality and margin are achieved within a clear code of practice.
Stars began its search for PLM as a way of managing the complexity of multinational design, development, manufacturing and distribution for multiple clients, before discovering the limitations of more traditional solutions - as CEO & President Bret Schnitker explains:
“One of the biggest challenges of our business model is the diversity of our customer base – particularly because we’re so heavily involved in design, development, and the creation of technical specifications for many of those customers. Traditional PLM solutions are almost universally set up to deal with single brands and rigid categories, whereas our clients all have different identities and different quality, performance, and delivery requirements. Today’s world requires us to be both agile and organised, so what immediately appealed to us about BeProduct was the ability to develop products for multiple clients on one platform, quickly and in an organised way.”
A veteran of several PLM implementations in previous roles, Schnitker and his team were also drawn to BeProduct’s affordability and accessibility. “With systems like PLM, historically the up-front investment was so massive that businesses felt burdened once they’d purchased a solution,” he explains. “People recognise that they need PLM in order to maintain performance and grow, but the result is often a complex implementation with heavy customisation, meaning the solution quickly falls behind the times. But with BeProduct, the whole solution is cloud-based, with an affordable monthly fee and no up-front investment in software or infrastructure. Being built that way also means BeProduct can be a living, breathing thing; as a user, you sign in one day to discover that an updated module or all-new functionality is available and ready to go. And that’s just so much more exciting than having an expensive, static solution that you’re stuck with until a milestone release is manually installed.”
As well as the strengths of the solution itself, Stars relished the opportunity to work closely with the BeProduct team to help shape the development of the solution – something that BeProduct Founder Daniel Pak believes is essential for any software vendor in the modern fashion market. “We are thrilled to consider Bret and his team as equal partners,” Pak says. “We understand the value of agility, and our goal is to build the most flexible tool for modern fashion businesses, making sure that a single solution can be deployed on the cloud and then configured, non-destructively, to meet the needs of almost any business model.”
Following a successful implementation and on-boarding process, BeProduct and Stars continue to collaborate, with future functionality in the areas of 3D and supply chain collaboration targeted for deployment very soon.
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