April 22nd, 2019

APP Group Chooses Centric PLM to Protect Productivity

CAMPBELL, Calif., 23 April, 2019 – APP Group, the Canadian outerwear company, has selected Centric Software’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to fashion, retail, footwear, outdoor, luxury and consumer goods companies to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

APP Group is headquartered in Montreal and owns two outerwear brands, Mackage and SOIA & KYO. Mackage was launched in 1999 and is now one of the most prestigious contemporary outerwear brands worldwide. The mission is clear: to elevate outerwear with a unique balance between fashion and function with collections that combine the finest leathers, downs, and wool with tailored silhouettes and precision detail; testament to the brand’s cornerstones of innovation, design and an unwavering commitment to outstanding quality.

Founded in 2004, SOIA & KYO has quickly grown into a sought-after outerwear brand for women. With luxurious materials and artful details, SOIA & KYO creates signature styles that speak for themselves. SOIA & KYO celebrates the beauty found in simplicity.

When working with email, Excel and cloud storage services became too cumbersome and inefficient, APP Group investigated PLM solutions.

“Our main challenge is providing data visibility between design teams and technical teams, and between our head office and remote offices,” explains Demet Ozdemir, Vice-President Production and Sourcing at APP Group. “Manual data entry takes up time that our talented teams could spend on productive tasks. We need to create a seamless flow of information that will give us visibility of the full development cycle.”

APP Group hired an external consultant to assess potential solutions. After a comprehensive demo session, they selected Centric 8 PLM.

“We see great success stories from major brands in our industry who work with Centric,” says Ozdemir. “Centric’s fashion experience means that they understand our obstacles and can offer insight into industry best practices. They offered us solutions from the start. Centric PLM is a user-friendly tool that will help facilitate communication across different time zones and languages and will also tie into our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. It will centralize shareable data and complete the full product lifecycle workflow.”

As Ozdemir concludes, “We expect to increase the productivity of each user’s role, establish data protection and security and share master library data between users. We’ll now have visibility of the full development cycle from line plan to final collection.”

“We are very happy to welcome APP Group as our tenth partner in Canada,” says Chris Groves, President and CEO of Centric Software. “APP Group will use Centric PLM to improve visibility and productivity at their outerwear brands, and we are anticipating great results. We look forward to partnering with them as they continue to grow and expand.”

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Join Centric’s Digital Innovation Happy Hour at Oztudio on May 1st from 5 to 7 p.m. and hear our customer Tanya Luongo, Business Analyst at La Maison Simons talk about digital transformation and the company’s journey to PLM with Centric Software.

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APP Group (www.appgroup.ca)

APP Group is the Montreal based parent company of Mackage and SOIA & KYO brands. We are creators, wholesalers and retailers of luxurious and quality outerwear, handbags and accessories, sold to upscale retailers in over 20 countries throughout the world. We also operate 11 Mackage stores in Canada and the USA and in 2018 we opened our first SOIA&KYO store in Toronto. Since our establishment in 1990, our operations continue to expand annually with offices currently in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Miami, Shanghai and Paris.

Centric Software (www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around the world, Centric Software provides a Digital Transformation Platform for the most prestigious names in fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Centric Visual Innovation Platform (VIP) is a visual, fully digital collection of boards for touch-based devices like iPad, iPhone and large-scale, touch-screen televisions. Centric VIP transforms decision making and automates execution to truly collapse time to market and distance to trend. Centric’s flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality, and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric SMB packages extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings tailored for small businesses.

Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM in 2018 and Frost & Sullivan’s Global Retail, Fashion, and Apparel PLM Product Differentiation Excellence Award in 2016 and 2012. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100 Global list in 2013, 2015, and 2016.

Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.