Based in the Netherlands, stichd was founded in 1979, initially known as Dobotex. Acquiring the sports merchandising company Brandon in 2015, both were combined under one umbrella as stichd in 2019, and now manages approximately 30 collections per season of varying sizes, with around 800 styles including both NOS (never-out-of-stock) and seasonal styles.
The company specializes in understanding and translating unique brand DNA in the design and marketing of legwear, bodywear, swimwear and fanwear. stichd connects brands, retailers and consumers to create experiences that matter. It does so successfully for clients including PUMA, Tommy Hilfiger, Levi’s and HEAD by investing in its brand partners — from product innovation to marketing and digital solutions — to ensure a seamless experience across all consumer touchpoints.
In addition, stichd applies their expertise of translating brand uniqueness into product in the fast-paced world of Motorsports. Besides working closely together with teams like BMW Motorsport and Porsche Motorsport, the company designs and develops licensed merchandise products for the biggest Formula 1 teams like McLaren Racing, Mercedes Motorsport, Scuderia Ferrari, Aston Martin and Red Bull Racing too.
After experiencing incredible growth in the past 40 years, parts of the processes and IT blueprint needed modernizing to support its expansion and to empower its design and product development teams to excel.
Bart Speet, responsible for the stichd PLM project management, explains, “We used to capture product data on local and shared drives, share it via email and FTP servers, which wasn’t a future-proof way of working. We started the search for a PLM solution to replace the old way of working and secure a single source of truth.”
“Centric ticked all of these boxes well ahead of its competitors. Not only were we able to do a reference check on the features and benefits, but we also found that Centric had extensive market-specific knowledge, with matching company sizing, and a local implementation team”.
The main objective for stichd in employing Centric PLM was to “do things right, and do things once,” as Speet says. The biggest advantage for stichd is being able to capture the entire design and sourcing part of the value chain in one system that always contains the latest input, can be accessed by all stakeholders, and accurately captures the business’s global oriented development efforts.
The Centric PLM implementation project was given its own acronym ‘SEAM’, which stands for Simplicity, Efficiency, Accuracy and Measurability. stichd refers to these four key pillars as guidelines every time a big PLM decision, such as data structure, is made.
stichd has completed a rollout of the software to product managers, design teams, developers, packaging engineers and quality assurance teams, with extremely satisfied users in every department. They’re now able to save time with a user-friendly, centralized system. “Centric PLM is the truth! We no longer need to question whether the product information is correct, it is all in there. This is the biggest change we’ve gone through,” says Speet.
“Now we have an IT backbone in place that we can benefit from for years.” When looking towards the future, Speet adds “We foresee Centric Software continuing to support us as a trustworthy partner who will develop the PLM system to our future standards, including alignment with other digital tools such as ERP.”
“We are thrilled to announce that stichd has successfully gone live with Centric PLM,” comments Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software. “We look forward to continuing to partner with stichd long into the future.”
