Time to Get Your House in Order: 11 Signs Data Chaos Is Wreaking Havoc on Your Home Décor and Furnishings Brand

Remember when working in home décor product development was supposed to be creative and fun? Now you could add “Copy/Paste Expert” to your résumé. You spend countless hours manually re-entering product specs from one spreadsheet or system to another. And with manual data entry, one slip of concentration can cause big problems, like accidentally pasting the wrong finish or dimensions into a spec sheet. (Oops, that accent table just got ordered in pewter instead of brass!). Repetitive data tasks not only sap your team’s morale, they introduce errors that snowball into costly delays. If your daily routine involves more copy-pasting than designing or strategizing, it’s time for a data makeover.

Key processes at your company live inside people’s heads, and that’s a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe Jennifer always handles the vendor order forms with all the SKUs, but she’s out on vacation. You cross your fingers and ask her assistant, only to find Jennifer never documented her “tricks” for that task. When product information and workflows aren’t captured in a central system, you’re one out-of-office away from stalled projects. In today’s fast-paced market, tribal knowledge is not enough. If critical steps live in sticky notes or one person’s memory rather than an accessible system, expect half-done work, delays and mistakes to plague your launch calendar.

Are you having nightmares about swarms of tiny cells and endless tabs? It’s common for home furnishings companies to juggle hundreds of spreadsheets each season, costings, SKUs, inventory, you name it. With multiple collections in development at once, it’s hard to know which spreadsheet is up-to-date. Where’s the sheet with the latest cost updates? Did someone email a new version or update the shared drive? Living in “spreadsheet chaos” means constantly searching for the right file and praying no one saved over it with old data. If version-control drama and Excel fatigue are daily headaches, your data management approach desperately needs modernization.

You spend hours designing home décor collections where every lamp, rug and accent ties the room together. But what happens when a material or fabric change, due to cost or a supplier issue, knocks one piece out of sync? Suddenly that item no longer fits the collection’s look, and it’s musical chairs to reshuffle products between assortments or drop them entirely. When you’re developing thousands of SKUs a year with constantly shifting designs, colors and finishes, keeping track of every change becomes an endless game of mix-and-match. Without a centralized system, you’ll feel like you can never quite “win.” Every change request sets off a chain reaction of manual updates across BOMs, line sheets, inventory lists… It’s exhausting. This data chaos not only frustrates your designers, it risks real errors, like selling a group of products that don’t actually coordinate. If managing product changes feels like chasing pieces on a chessboard, take it as a sign that you need a single source of truth for product data.

You’re scrambling to finish a product costing report that’s due yesterday, but a key piece of info, say, the latest shipping rates from your logistics team, is nowhere to be found. Why? Because the logistics folks use their own offline database, and you have to wait for someone to pull the data and email it over. When different departments use disconnected systems (or worse, spreadsheets on local drives), information gets trapped in silos and bottlenecks you can’t control. It’s 2025: retailers and regulators alike demand end-to-end transparency in product data. If your team can’t instantly access current materials, specs, compliance documents or supplier info because data lives “all over the place,” it’s not just frustrating, it’s a serious competitive liability. Centralizing your product data isn’t a “nice to have” anymore, it’s an imperative to keep up with industry demands.

How often are you alt-tabbing to Google a currency conversion? If calculating product costs involves sourcing materials from Thailand in baht, Italian fabrics in euros, and selling in the US and UK in different currencies, you might have multiple browser tabs open just to figure out your margins. With today’s exchange rate volatility and inflation fluctuations, manual currency conversion is risky and inefficient. Using consumer tools like Google’s converter every day indicates your systems aren’t handling multi-currency data dynamically. One typo or outdated rate and you could seriously mis-price a product. A modern PLM with built-in currency and unit conversion can automate this – if you’re still doing it by hand, that’s a flashing warning sign that your data processes belong in another era.

Do you spend more time in status update meetings than actually working on products? When information isn’t shared in a central platform, teams compensate by scheduling endless meetings to sync up. Design reviews, line plan updates, “did you get my email?” check-ins, your calendar is overflowing because that’s the only way to stay aligned. You’re not alone: 78% of employees say they attend so many meetings that it’s hard to get work done, and over half end up working overtime due to meeting overload. If every week is a blur of Zoom calls just to chase down the latest info, it’s a sign of underlying data disarray. Streamlining communication through a digital system (where real-time updates replace some meetings) can free your team from meeting madness. Fewer meetings = more time to focus on actually developing and merchandising great products.

Late nights. Early mornings. You and your team are burning the candle at both ends trying to keep up with an endless stream of data consolidation, error correction and last-minute firefighting. When vital information is scattered and constantly changing, it often means manual rework at the eleventh hour, leading to stress and burnout. Perhaps you’re staying up past midnight preparing a line review because sales numbers, design changes and sourcing updates only came together at the last second. If you catch your reflection and see Zombie Chic staring back, it’s because inefficient processes are literally exhausting your team. Burnout isn’t just bad for employees; it’s bad for business, contributing to turnover and mistakes. The pace of retail in 2025 isn’t slowing down, so it’s critical to eliminate the time-wasters (see signs #1–8!) that force your team to live in crisis mode.

A brilliant new designer is eager to join your company – until they get a peek under the hood at how you work. In the interview, they learn they’d spend more time chasing spreadsheets than actually designing, and suddenly that offer letter remains unsigned. Today’s up-and-coming talent, especially Gen Z, won’t tolerate a workplace stuck in the digital dark ages. In fact, 70% of Gen Z employees would switch jobs for better technology and digital tools. The next generation of designers, product developers and merchandisers expects modern, user-friendly systems to maximize their creativity. If you’re losing great candidates (or your young hires keep leaving) because your tech stack is painfully outdated, that’s a huge red flag. A data chaos environment not only hurts your current operations – it repels the very talent you need to innovate for the future. To attract and retain skilled employees, you’ll need to ditch the swivel-chair workflows and empower them with intuitive, collaborative technology.

That guy in Sourcing still hasn’t sent the material detail updates you requested, and you’re starting to wonder if your emails are going into a black hole. Chances are, you’re not the only one having communication issues, your colleagues in sourcing, design, merchandising, etc. are probably also scrambling to get information from each other. Everyone is doing their best, but when each team has its own data sources and timelines, miscommunication abounds. You might all feel like you’re in the same boat, rowing frantically but never in sync and worrying if the ship is slowly taking on water. This is what happens when there’s no single source of truth: constant back-and-forth to verify information and a creeping dread that something important is slipping through the cracks. If you frequently find yourself asking “Did you get my update?” or “Is anyone listening?”, it’s time to overhaul how your teams share information.

The cure for these 11 woes? A unified digital platform. If several of these signs sound painfully familiar, it’s a clear indication that data chaos is undermining your home décor or furniture brand’s success. A modern PLM solution like Centric PLM™ brings all your product data and workflows into one cohesive system, enabling real-time collaboration across departments and geographies. The payoff is huge: faster time to market, fewer errors, less rework and happier teams. Leading home & furniture brands have already jumped off the “data crazy train.” They’re using Centric Software’s PLM to streamline product development and put their creative and strategic energy back where it belongs – into designing products and growing the business, not chasing data. It’s time to get your house in order and let data chaos be a thing of the past.