Comfort-focused sock brand Bombas has invested in a PLM system to help manage its growth and streamline operations.
The company, which donates a pair of socks to homeless shelters for every pair sold, has selected Centric Software to provide its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution.
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To date, more than 9m pairs of socks have been donated to people in need through 1,200 non-profit partners across all 50 US states. Based in New York, Bombas has invested heavily in research and development to produce innovative fabrics for its supremely comfortable socks for men, women and children.
Bombas is a swiftly growing company with plans to expand into new product categories in the near future. Kristen Pandolph, VP product development at Bombas, explains that the brand’s popularity brought challenges that could only be solved with digital solutions.
“We are growing extremely quickly and adding new product categories, but everything we do is still Excel-based, from creating tech packs to tracking samples. We also end up with a lot of duplicate reports from different departments. As we grow and add categories and partnerships as well as wholesale distribution, we need to make sure all of our information is captured in one place and is up-to-date and accurate. Although we’re hiring people right and left as we grow, we’re still a pretty lean team, so we need to be able to collaborate and communicate efficiently.”
Bombas decided to search for a PLM solution and interviewed several vendors before settling on Centric Software’s cloud-based, SaaS solution for small to medium enterprises, Centric SMB.
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By GlobalData“Centric offers a ‘one-stop-shop’ solution with the most comprehensive views and configurations for design, development, production and merchandising,” Pandolph adds. “We were also impressed with the number of companies on-boarded in the last couple of years. Centric has good out-of-the-box sensibilities and is extremely visual, user-friendly and quick to implement. We can essentially do all of the training internally, which will cut costs.”
The company expects to see benefits quickly due to the rapid implementation time, including eliminating the need for so many emails and streamlining tech pack creation and the tracking of samples and packaging.
“It will be really nice to have all of our information in one place and give multiple team members in multiple departments easy access to that information. A lot of the information is exportable in Excel and PDF, which will make it easy to bring our factory partners on board,” Pandolph says.
