Top Turkish fast-fashion company Koton has chosen Centric Software®‘s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to streamline its processes and boost productivity. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, home décor, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Founded in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1988, Koton is now present in 30 countries with 500 stores internationally and over 1,000 points of sale around the world. With a vision to become a global fashion brand across five continents, more than 90 million product sales are made per year across its main women’s and men’s ranges and its trademarked sub-brands in other categories including lingerie, jeans, accessories, sport, beauty and kids lines.
With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing store closures and impacting their revenues, introducing this new, digital-first way of working became more crucial than ever for Koton to modernize its processes – from design, sourcing and merchandising for stores to its e-commerce business – and adopt a robust, integrated, data-driven system to support decision-making throughout the entire product lifecycle.
“We realised the whole process was a hybrid system – we had some in-house systems, some legacy systems and manual processes all at work,” explains Mesut Akyıldız, Director of IT and Process Development at Koton. “Information was passed between all of these departments, often on paper, sometimes verbally, and changes were made but not all recorded, so it was very difficult to pinpoint problems and evaluate all the processes to identify what needed to be fixed.”
Centric PLM was the obvious choice for Koton, as not only did many high-profile brands recommend Centric with glowing references, Koton was impressed with Centric’s professionalism, expertise and intention to support their business to produce tangible results.
“Speaking directly with President and CEO of Centric Software Chris Groves made us feel we were a very valuable customer,” says Akyıldız. “When we heard from Chris about how the company has grown, and his passion for the Centric ethos, this really made a difference for us. The application was also very robust – when we asked questions, we got very detailed answers from the Centric team. Whenever I need support, I am confident I am going to get it from Centric.”
“Now we’re in the implementation stage, the Centric project team is setting up all the processes and understanding our requirements. With Centric PLM, we are expecting a big increase in productivity in the next five years, as well as faster processes that meet customer requirements, and create products more appropriate for their needs. We predict revenues will increase and be impacted in a positive way.”
Centric PLM is also enabling Koton to achieve its sustainability objectives by more easily managing its new sustainable fashion line, which uses recycled materials to help environmental causes and the community.
“We are thrilled to be working with Koton to support its digital transformation goals,” comments Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software. “We are proud that Koton considers Centric as not just a vendor but its long-term technology partner, and we look forward to continuing this exciting journey together.”
