Centric Visual Concept Board
A zero-to-one project, creating a new product offering that allows fashion and retail teams use real-time data from multiple business systems to visualize their products and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
Company:
Centric Software
Year:
2018
Timeframe:
1 year
Lead Product Designer
Overview
In 2017, Centric Software, a leading provider of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software, set out to design and build a new platform that enables fashion and retail teams to utilize real-time data from multiple business systems to visualize their products and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
Problem
Virtually every fashion company around the world uses some form of physical visual medium, requiring an army of assistant designers allocating valuable time to non-value added creation of physical artifacts i.e.printing, cutting, pasting mini-bodies, pinning fabric swatches that are difficult to see, sticking post-its and stickers. If an important stakeholder can’t attend a meeting, it’s impossible to fully brief them on decisions made, and a huge amount of ‘scribing’ is needed to record the meetings, which can lead to human errors such as inefficient workflows, creative misalignment, and collaboration gaps.
Solution
As design lead, I partnered closely with cross-functional teams and clients to better understand workflows and business processes within the fashion and retail space and design a scalable solution that can serve the needs of fashion designers, product development teams, merchandisers, and marketing teams. I designed a sandbox solution that allowed fashion design teams to easily capture design intent with real-time PLM production data (i.e. material, style, color, etc. libraries), run meetings as a digital catalog, and track stakeholder comments and changes within the system.
Results
The Centric Visual Concept Board offered game-changing technology that enabled brands and retailers to execute business-critical decisions with maximum efficiency and be future-ready in the face of market disruptions. Assortment creation, something that used to take weeks, if not months, to achieve, can now be done in an hour-long meeting, and updates or changes can now be made on-the-fly, saving Centric customers an estimated $1.5M in travel costs.
