Outer, the eco-friendly outdoor furniture brand, has selected Centric Software®’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. 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.
Based out of Los Angeles, California and founded by Terry Lin and Jiake Liu in 2017, Outer is a direct-to-consumer outdoor furniture brand on a mission to bring life outside, one backyard at a time. Their revolutionary Neighborhood Showroom program encourages prospective shoppers to experience Outer furniture in the real-life backyards of existing Outer customers.
Mark Beilock, Director of Program Management at Outer, talks about their product development. “The top challenge is being able to track products, what stage they’re in, the information around them, the documents connected to them. Even the materials manufacturers are using, the sourcing pipeline, and the overview of what products are under development.”
He describes the current process and lists the tools they are using. “A lot of Excel spreadsheets, Google docs, and tech packs in PDFs. And some 3D files that aren’t linked to anything. We use Dropbox but it’s not all in one place. We need to reduce some of the work that we’re doing in costing and BOM because it’s so manual right now. One, it causes a lot of mistakes, and two, it just takes up bandwidth.”
Beilock says, “We want to unite the product development team to be able to work all in one system and to share information through that system in a more streamlined way.” Outer evaluated a few PLM solutions but chose Centric for its robustness, intuitiveness, and functionality. Beilock outlines the expectations they have of Centric PLM. “At a high level, we’re trying to achieve visibility in terms of the status of products in development including for senior leadership. At the same time, we want to improve collaboration with our factories. We’ll have document control—no more losing files in emails—and the factory can access the system whenever they want to retrieve the information they need. It will eliminate accidentally working on a previous version. Also, having access to all the information makes presentations, regarding action plans and key decisions to senior management, easier. It’ll all be in one place within Centric.”
The company takes social responsibility and sustainability seriously. Beilock says,
“Our Chief Design Officer, Terry Lin designs our products with sustainability in mind. We look to be able to conserve the world’s resources.” Each Outer wicker chair is made with 99+ recycled plastic bottles diverted from landfills and waterways and the company was recently Climate Neutral certified. On the CSR side, they work with their factory, owned by the CEO’s family, to ensure fair wages, a safe work environment and benefits for families and their children.
Operating their own warehouses is a definite plus in Outer’s business model. Beilock explains the advantage, “Supply chain issues have certainly affected us, but at the same time, we strive to bring a product to market in a timely fashion and be ready for our customers. So, we do keep a lot of inventory in warehouses in the United States, while competitors might drop ship from Asia. Based on each order we have, we would have product here ready to go when the customer orders.”
President and CEO of Centric Software, Chris Groves, says, “I am delighted that Outer has chosen Centric PLM for product development. We are proud to partner with a company that puts environmental, social and governance (ESG) at the forefront of their business. It is important to spend more time outdoors and Outer’s furniture and accessories invite us to do just that.”
