Classic Prep Childrenswear, the traditional children’s apparel company, has selected Centric Software®’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution for emerging brands, Centric SMB. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to fashion, retail, footwear, outdoor, luxury and consumer goods companies to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
Classic Prep Childrenswear (CPC) was founded in 2016 by partners, Ginger Drysdale and Josh Jewett. Based in Rowayton, Connecticut, the company designs and manufactures comfortable, easy-care children’s apparel with classic, preppy styling that goes from frolicking to formal occasions.
The company has enjoyed rapid growth over the past year and a half, especially after placing new focus on their direct-to-consumer business. They recently ramped up their in-house staffing to more than double their pre-COVID-19 levels. This stressed the need to have a system that allowed collaborative and simultaneous work, to eliminate the issues around using Dropbox and spreadsheets.
Says Jewett, “I’ve been very frustrated about how we manage and communicate with our data. Developing tech packs, purchase orders and trying to do things like calculate fabric utilization, that theoretically should just take a couple of days to do, takes weeks. We’re having to constantly go back and forth into Dropbox because a spreadsheet didn’t get updated properly, and we were running into issue after issue related to just this data problem, which in 2021 shouldn’t even be a consideration.”
The CPC team laid out all their requirements for a digital solution, which included having the design, merchandising, and planning teams benefit from it. Also, meeting the company’s current needs but being able to grow with them. They did a search for solutions, sitting through numerous demos.
CPC ultimately chose Centric SMB, a SaaS, cloud-based PLM solution tailored for emerging businesses. The powerful out-of-the-box functionality met all of their needs, with Centric’s responsiveness and expertise sealing the deal. Jewett says that referrals were an important part of their decision-making process. “Steve (from Centric) put us in touch with a current Centric customer that had literally just switched from the other system that we were considering. We could actually talk through their decision and why they had made the move, which were all the same reasons that we had, so it was perfect.”
Says Jewett, “I foresee it being tremendously helpful to make us much more efficient. We’ll be able to create POs and templates for our different factories in a matter of days instead of weeks. We’ll create component lists for an entire line that’s going into production and be able to quickly export and identify what our testing requirements are going to be, instead of having to pour through excel tech packs to make sure we captured everything.”
Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software says, “It is a pleasure to be able to partner with this fast-growing, children’s apparel company. We are privileged to contribute to the continued success of Classic Prep now and moving forward.”
