The Agile PLM for fashion SMEs
Do you need tech that is fully flexible and customizable like Asana or Airtable, or something rigid like a PLM?
The problem is too much customization without structure takes a lot of time to build from the start while too much rigidity doesn’t allow tech to mould to your brand’s unique needs.
So, the answer is often something that’s a mix of the two—structure where it is needed and full flexibility in the areas where it is needed.
Watch/Listen to Co-Founder + Head of Product, Flora Davidson, explain why SupplyCompass was built to be a more agile, flexible PLM for fashion SMEs that allows for easy implementation and helps you hit the ground running.
Video Transcript
I’m actually just gonna take these as my example. So one end, one end of the spectrum, here. So first move this out the way. If you just put PLM here and then you’ve got super flexible customizable tools, like Asana, Monday, Airtable, Excel. This, like the positives of this, it’s fashion specific, it really understands the unique needs of this industry, but it’s quite rigid. It’s also been built a while back and it’s not necessarily evolved to cater to the modern brand.
On this side, you’ve got tools that are fully flexible to your process. You can start using them immediately. You can set up a nice timeline in a Asana or a Monday pretty quick, and it, it kind of gives brands that user experience that, that feels more them, that everyone can get on board with, but it’s so customizable that you spend so much time setting up these frameworks. The most important thing is that you’re making it work for you and just you as a business. Now, someone joins in, they’ve actually set up a different way of working in their other brand. You share it with a factory, they are then bending over to these 20 different ways that every single brand shares with them, a different layout. So it’s so customizable that actually, if you jump into it, it can be really hard to make sense of it immediately. So at least here PLM, PLM-flower here, you know what you’re looking at when you’re looking at it, because it’s structured in a way that makes sense and it’s always the same. This you’re jumping in. You go “What? Okay. So let me just get my head around. So we’ve got the styles here. This is okay. Yeah. That makes sense.” By the time you made sense of it, you’re probably a little bit lost and then you put information in the wrong place. There’s too much room for error there and that’s too much, too much structure and rigidity.
Have you ever been on a rubbish date? Yeah, so most of the brands that we actually speak to, about two or three minutes, into the conversation with them, we hear them bring up their ex. Now I’m not talking about the ex that you’re thinking about. We’re talking about, a bad implementation ex. So this word implementation, you can see people’s hairs go on end and they just think not another implementation, and everyone recounts their awful stories about their bad break-up this horrible implementation process. They’re scarred by the experience. It shouldn’t take six months to start learning something.
When we started designing SupplyCompass, we created the Mum Test and the Mum Test is me putting our platform in front of my mum. She’s not from the fashion industry, but it doesn’t matter. You could be the biggest expert in that part of the process, but you need to be able to find your way around that platform immediately. Otherwise, if you’re a factory or someone new to a company, trying to work out where something’s at and you can’t find it, then we failed.
Want to read and view the full Talking Tech series where Flora talks about the specific problems in the fashion industry that SupplyCompass is uniquely solving?
Read the full series:
- Fashion is Creative, Tech needs to be too
- Here’s how Tech enables Sustainability
- SMEs need agile, hybrid tech
- Tech needs to be 2-sided and Collaborative
- You’ve got to get Sampling right!
- Enter Collaborative Date-ing.
- It’s all about The Style.
- The Agile PLM for SMEs
- Brands need Structured, Shared Workspaces.
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Nayanika is a designer, writer and illustrator whose work spans research, storytelling and strategy for sustainability in fashion. Her interests specifically lie in sustainable supply chains, craft production/innovation, circular economies and design for social innovation. She graduated from the prestigious MA Fashion Futures program at London College of Fashion with a Distinction in 2019, and has researched at and written for Centre for Sustainable Fashion and Fashion Revolution, amongst others.
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