RuffleButts, the kids’ swimwear and clothing company, 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 in a suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, RuffleButts was founded 15 years ago starting with ruffled bloomers for baby girls, hence the name. The company creates joyful clothing for the treasured years of childhood. RuggedButts for boys was added later, offering a full wardrobe for girls and boys all the way into the tween years.
Audrie Garcia, Production & Design Manager at RuffleButts, says, ”We’re growing quite a bit and adding new product categories, new sizing—and it was just getting to be a lot to manage.” She talks about the manual work and duplicate data entry in a typical product development cycle, adding, “We have hundreds of Google sheets for specs alone. Then we have different sheets for our color library, and a SKU creation doc on another sheet.”
There were many steps on the creative side as well. Designers would have to copy-paste their designs from Adobe™ Illustrator to a digital project board in the design phase. When the project moves on to development or production, the design gets re-entered into another sheet where tech packs are created and is finally sent to the factory, often via email. Garcia says, “We’re entering data in multiple spots. And things just get lost or missed, or someone changes the size in one doc but forgets to change it in another… We want to streamline the process overall.”
On top of all that, being in the children’s apparel category subjects the company to strict regulations to comply with government safety standards. Garcia says, “There are so many rules, for example, no lead in the thread, zippers, buttons and obviously, flammability. We save that information on our internal shared drive, but you can’t access it outside of the office. And it isn’t currently linked back to any product. I may know that we have a testing document for certain products and where to go find it, but there’s not an easy way for anyone, other than me, to know that this product has been tested.”
RuffleButts decided on PLM as a strategy and evaluated a few providers. Much research and several demos took place over the course of a year. One of the most important features Garcia says, is “scalability, because our growth rate right now is phenomenal. I wanted to make sure that whatever company we chose could scale with us. The PLM had to have capabilities beyond just the product team—we may want to bring in more users like marketing, our e-commerce team, or our buyers and planners. During the demos, I eventually noticed that Centric was one of the only companies I saw that allows for that without going through a lot of hoop jumping.”
Garcia expects to save a considerable amount of time once they are fully up and running. She states, “I did the math a while ago. Overall, we will save about a week and a half’s worth of work per season, just on the product engineering or data information side. On the design side, the Adobe Connect plugin is great to link Adobe Illustrator directly with Centric PLM; designers won’t have to leave Illustrator, eliminating many of their repetitive tasks. It’ll also help with calendar management and sample status—looking at the Centric home screen, I could have a widget on my dashboard that tells me the status at a glance.”
Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric says, “We are pleased to be partnering with RuffleButts, a fresh, rapidly growing company in the apparel space. They bring fun and functional clothing to families, and we are thrilled to have been selected as their partner.”
