Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, is pleased to announce that BYLT Basics, the premium basics apparel company, has selected Centric PLM™ to speed time to market. 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, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.
BYLT Basics was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. It began with a drop cut shirt and now offers affordable, head-to-toe premium basics including outerwear, mid-layers and footwear with tailored fits, elevated designs and enhanced materials. Initially a men’s brand, they are expanding into womenswear as well.
The company needed to improve product development efficiency to keep pace with their growing collections. There were challenges with their process as the business was expanding at an accelerated rate. Karoline Harvey, Technical Design Manager at BYLT Basics gives an example. “Style numbers can get lost when you’re manually assigning them, and then as they go through the system, a letter or number would get changed. Sometimes, the vendors didn’t even use the style number. We are centralizing a permanent number for each style. And follow that through the whole lifecycle of the product.”
“We’d like to keep all of our specs together in one spot. You can update something in an Excel file, but then it never gets updated in the actual tech pack, or it doesn’t get updated from the factory. Centric PLM is an easy way for us to be honest with ourselves and make sure that the spec is true to what our product is.”
The company releases product continuously. Harvey says, “Right now we are mainly direct-to-consumer so people buy off of our website. We develop in two seasons, but since we’re DTC, we drop product all throughout the year. We have a lot of flexibility with that, depending on when we feel the products need to drop.”
Centric PLM came highly recommended by an international factory. Harvey says, “We really only explored Centric, to be honest. After we had the demo, all of us really loved it and seeing the many industry partners Centric works with in the apparel space, we were pretty much sold. We saw all the capabilities. What really resonates with us is the single source of truth. Having that information housed in one area was of main importance to us.”
Implementation was on time and on budget. Harvey says, “The training and onboarding process was amazing. I think the major benefit of the training was being really involved; I was active in our calls, did the homework, really tested out what Centric taught us and made sure we modified anything we needed to work for our business. My biggest takeaway is the time we put in on the front end, made the transition into actual implementation so much smoother. We had all of our views built out, and everything dialed in before we started putting in tech packs. It’s been a really smooth process to get all the data in because we were all trained and had the system prepped.”
Harvey lists some expected benefits. “When I started at BYLT, I created an Excel illustrator structure for tech packs, and now that we’re in Centric, that’s even more advanced. QC will be able to reference fully built out tech packs for inspections, and keep the factories honest with respect to construction and all the details that we call out. It’s been a progression for us to have something to actually judge our product against and make sure it is right when we get it in the warehouse. Also, it’ll really help speed up making new products because all that data will already be in there—grades for specs, existing fabrics—all that will be easy to import for new styles. Product creation will be a lot quicker.”
President and CEO of Centric Software, Chris Groves says, “It is a pleasure to play a part in this fast-growing startup. We are glad that BYLT Basics has chosen Centric PLM as their digital transformation foundation and are looking forward to working with them in the years to come.”
