Blogs

High Street retailers and brands face significant headwinds in 2021 considering extended lockdowns, Brexit, demand uncertainties and rising shipping costs. Operational resilience and agility are essential to survive in the near term and grow long term. But “best-practices” of years past tied to efficiency have proven short-sighted; particularly outsourcing of key responsibilities to suppliers, 3rd party logistics providers, overseas agents and banks.

As fashion organizations grow to introduce new products or clothing lines, acquire other companies, shift priorities, and change channels to market, key stakeholders can be left out of the conversation. A networked approach to running your company can solve these problems.

Using an advanced, cloud-based network can connect all supply chain partners, events, and devices—giving companies end-to-end visibility with actionable insights that are delivered in real time.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the first step in reinforcing a collaborative network which is to establish a strong product lifecycle management process that helps manage collections, sustainable fabric compositions, and design specifications.

An established digital ecosystem lets brands reduce design-plan-manufacture cycles, improve supply chain planning accuracy, enable end-to-end inventory visibility, and help manage financial orchestration and liquidity. This helps ensure that the right products get to the right place, at the right time—on budget, and aligned with sustainability efforts that appeal to customers socially and environmentally.

The shift in demand toward holistic brand experiences is forcing fashion brands to adapt to new circumstances and expectations by creating more resilient, connected, and transparent value chains that deliver on the brand promise, regardless of industry challenges.