December 5th, 2023

Bestseller Fashion Group China & Centric Software Expand Partnership with Centric Planning & Centric Visual Boards

Fashion leader implements Centric retail planning and visual assortment optimization solutions in response to dynamic and competitive market

CAMPBELL, Calif., December 6, 2023 – Centric Software^®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, is pleased to announce that fashion giant Bestseller Fashion Group China (BSFGC) has expanded their partnership with the implementation of Centric Planning™and Centric Visual Boards™. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, price and sell products such as apparel, fashion, home, footwear, sporting goods, consumer electronics, cosmetics, food & beverage, and luxury to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

BSFGC was established in 1996 and is a member of the Bestseller Group clothing and accessories company, headquartered in Denmark. Based in Beijing, BSFGC markets clothing and accessories online and in more than 4,000 stores in China under brands including ONLY, Jack & Jones, Vero Moda and J. Lindeberg.

BSFGC is a long-standing Centric Software customer, having selected Centric PLM^TM in 2014 to improve productivity and collaboration with the business goals of being more flexible and responsive to consumer demand in the fast-changing Chinese market. With the digital foundation for their e-commerce and retail strategy in place, BSFGC is leveraging that base by adding Centric Planning and Centric Visual Boards to deliver merchandise financial planning, assortment strategy and optimization (range planning) as well as visual assortment planning.

Dan Friis, Managing Partner of BSFGC states, “We were keen to build an end-to-end platform with a seamless data flow to create business transparency and generate more collaboration. Now, together with Centric Software we are delivering a solution for design visualization, analytics and collaboration the hands of designers, product developers and buyers.”

Responsiveness is critical, says Friis. “With Centric Planning and Centric Visual Boards, we will be able to speed decision-making in response to market changes.”

Friis emphasizes that market dynamics, particularly in China but also worldwide, are a core driver behind this strategic decision. Evolving consumer behavior is compelling retailers to take action either through technological upgrades or niche positioning. Better planning technology will enable BSFGC to serve a variety of consumer segments across all channels.

“Pre-season planning at all price points is crucial, as our consumer base has become much more diverse in terms of age and spending power,” explains Friis.

“We must be able to handle omnichannel consumer engagement and increased complexity in cross-channel pricing. Centric Planning and Centric Visual Boards will enable us to achieve more targeted omnichannel assortments.”

BSFGC is passionate about laying a robust foundation for their go-to-market strategy by streamlining pre-season planning and enhancing in-season responsiveness. Centric Software’s powerful AI-driven retail planning and collaborative visual assortment optimization solutions will empower BSFGC to segment with precision through detailed attributes and gain end-to-end visibility and control over financial plans and assortments.

“We believe Centric Planning and Centric Visual Boards will bring more structure to the range planning process and will allow us to take additional criteria into consideration for a tighter, more cohesive collection and a more focused go-to-market strategy,” he concludes. “Centric Planning and Centric Visual Boards will also increase our success rate for new designs through improved accuracy in pre-season planning and help us lead the way in industry best practices. Many companies believe that digitalizing design is more important, but to us, accurate range planning and procurement are key.”

“We are excited to embark on a new stage of partnership with Bestseller Fashion Group China,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “We are working closely with the BSFGC team in a challenging retail landscape, and we are looking forward to innovating solutions that will deliver greater responsiveness, planning accuracy and competitiveness.”

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Bestseller Fashion Group China (www.bestseller.com/)

Centric Software® (www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-replenishment platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in consumer goods like fashion, outdoor, luxury, home, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

· Centric PLM™, the leading PLM solution for consumer goods, optimizes product execution from ideation to development, sourcing and manufacture, realizing up to 50% improvement in productivity.

· Centric Planning™ is an innovative, cloud-native, AI solution delivering end-to-end planning capabilities to maximize retail and wholesale business performance resulting in a 110% increase in margin.

· Centric Pricing & Inventory™ leverages AI to drive margins and boost revenues by up to 18% via price and inventory optimization from pre-season to in-season to season completion.

· Centric Market Intelligence™ is an AI-driven platform giving insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitivity and get closer to the consumer, with a proven 12% increase in average initial price point.

· Centric Visual Boards™ pivot actionable data in a visual-first orientation to ensure robust, consumer-right assortments and product offers, increasing product portfolios by up to 90% using the same resources.

Centric Software’s market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition appears regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.