April 30th, 2025

Take on Tariffs with Centric Software Solutions for Cosmetics & Personal Care

Competitive market intelligence, cost simulation, supplier management and consumer response are all tools Centric Software provides to combat tariff uncertainty

CAMPBELL, Calif., May 1, 2025 – Centric Software’s end-to-end concept-to-commercialization solutions like Centric PLM™ mitigate uncertainty caused by tariff activity. Centric Software® provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, formulate, develop, procure, manufacture and sell consumer goods products in cosmetics & personal care, food & beverage, fashion and multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Recent tariff activity has affected cosmetics & personal care companies, resulting in fluctuating ingredient and packaging costs. Changes in regulations are happening day-by-day and companies must figure out how to absorb the rise in costs or adjust pricing strategies to pass increases on to consumers.

Centric Software’s wider end-to-end product lifecycle platform, Centric PLM integrates with all Centric Software solutions including Centric Market Intelligence™ and Centric PXM™. All Centric Software solutions, infused with AI optimization as a natural evolution of trusted rule-based methods, target the unique challenges faced by the retail sector and deliver comprehensive, data-driven decision-making for modern retail operations.

Real-time access to data becomes crucial. Centric Market Intelligence fights uncertainty by giving companies insight into what competitors are doing with respect to pricing, discounting and positioning. Brands and retailers can develop pricing strategies across global markets, informed by granular, SKU-level insights and international benchmarking capabilities. This gives the ability to proactively optimize global assortments and price position.

Other ways to combat the effect of tariffs are to:

Manage or switch suppliers – due to tariffs being higher on goods/ingredients from certain countries.
Reformulate – a specific ingredient may become unavailable or prohibitively expensive due to tariffs, so companies could be pressed into reformulating.
Source new packaging – similar to ingredients, packaging from certain countries are disproportionately taxed, so may require changing countries from where the materials are sourced or partner more closely with suppliers to come to a suitable fix.

Centric Software technologies enable all these strategies.

Centric PLM facilitates agile product development, enabling companies to quickly adapt to market changes, evaluate and compare suppliers, simulate costing scenarios, adjust landed cost calculations, support multi-sourcing strategies, and facilitate quick supplier revision requests.

With AI-formula matching, developers get a head start in formulating or reformulating products. Centric PLM manages packaging from briefs, to specifications to artwork and labeling. Ingredient and nutrition label information is pulled directly from PLM into packaging, eliminating the chance for error that exists when transferring data manually between systems.

To improve consumer experience across all touchpoints, Centric PXM, Centric product experience management, combines product information management (PIM), digital asset management (DAM), content syndication to e-commerce sites, marketplaces and social media and digital shelf analytics (DSA). It captures demand signals from digital sales channels and shows consumer behavior in real-time, creating a continuous feedback loop, so brands can quickly adjust products, pricing and inventory to personalize customer experiences and increase sell-through in response to whatever the current conditions are.

“Centric Software’s market-driven solutions equip cosmetics & personal care companies to weather economic disruptions, whether they are from new tariffs, supply chain issues or other world events,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “For the cosmetics industry in particular, packaging makes up a large portion of the cost, so changes in packaging supply have a similarly large effect. With the tools we provide, companies can run ‘what-if’ scenarios on not just cost, but manufacturing locations, splitting it among countries to determine what makes the most sense taking shipping into account as well.”

Learn how to mitigate retail uncertainty with Centric’s Tariff Hub

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Centric Software® (centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-commercialization platform for cosmetics & personal care manufacturers, brands and multi-category retailers. As experts in all fast-moving consumer goods, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to design, develop, source, comply, buy, make, package, price, allocate, market and sell products. Centric solutions optimize the product portfolio, harmonize product offers and streamline product development by speeding time to market and innovation while enhancing quality control and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Centric PLM™ features integrated industry best practices and innovative, AI-enabled capabilities tailored specifically for cosmetics & personal care manufacturers and retailers. Seamlessly manage the overall product lifecycle, from initial concept and formula development to packaging, quality, supplier collaboration, labeling, production, SKU rationalization and beyond. Results include up to a 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
Centric Visual Boards™ are a visually oriented product portfolio optimization tool. A singular accessible workspace pulls in real-time data and imagery from multiple business systems. It is a new, visual way of working to ensure robust, consumer-right product offers, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.
Centric Market Intelligence™ is an AI-driven platform delivering insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitivity and get closer to the consumer, with an up to 12% increase in average initial price point.
Centric PXM™, AI-powered product experience management encompasses PIM, DAM, content syndication and digital shelf analytics (DSA) to optimize the product commercialization lifecycle resulting in a transformed brand experience. Increase sales channels, boost sell through and drive margins.

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, appearing regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.