April 17th, 2025

Dansko Goes Live with Centric PLM to Streamline Workflows and Drive Growth

Footwear company steps up innovation and creativity

CAMPBELL, Calif., April 17, 2025 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce that Dansko, the renowned comfort footwear brand, has successfully gone live with Centric PLM™. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Founded in 1990 in Pennsylvania, Dansko is a women-founded, employee-owned brand known for its iconic clogs and commitment to comfort. Trusted by professionals in healthcare, education and hospitality, its APMA Seal of Acceptance styles prioritize foot health. Dansko’s collection is available in select U.S. and Canadian retailers and online.

As the company expanded and demand for its heritage products grew, managing product data became increasingly inefficient. Traditional methods proved challenging, leading Dansko to seek a robust PLM solution.

After evaluating several vendors, Dansko ultimately selected Centric Software. When asked about how they made their decision, VP of Sourcing Susan Li replies, “The system itself—the functionality and the design. It matches our process, plus we are excited about the integrations with our existing software.”

As Dansko prepared for implementation, the team took a step back to evaluate and fine-tune its workflows. Li notes, “Going through the pre-implementation exercises allowed us to look at our existing processes and critically examine whether each step made sense to the overall flow.”

Dansko’s VP of Design Kelsey Jayne explains, “Updating all of the changes in the visual documents was a pain point, so having Centric connect with Adobe Illustrator is a huge plus for our team. With Centric PLM we will have more time to focus on the design and creative aspects. In addition, the system is very clean and user-friendly. It is easy to search and find the data you’re looking for. That’s very helpful and something we can’t do in spreadsheets.”

Jayne adds, “Expanding into new product categories was challenging due to varying manufacturing requirements.” Centric PLM handles growth with ease—organizing product data, streamlining workflows and capturing multiple processing modes, all in one digital location.

Dansko is impressed with how the Centric Software team configured the system to fit its needs. The company plans to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the next phase. Li explains, “When our systems talk to each other, the information will flow from PLM to ERP, which is going to increase the accuracy, efficiency and reduce duplication of work.” Li continues, “and we love the reports that are automatically generated. This speaks to the efficiency of Centric PLM.”

President of Centric Software, Fabrice Canonge says, “We are happy that Dansko, a comfort footwear company, has chosen Centric PLM to enable growth. By automating previously time-consuming tasks, Centric PLM gives teams the space to focus on creativity and innovation, driving new product development.”

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Dansko (dansko.com)

Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneurial-spirited woman, Mandy Cabot, Dansko quickly became a trailblazer in the comfort footwear industry. As a woman-founded, women-led and women celebrated brand, Dansko has always been committed to empowering women. In 2012, Mandy envisioned a future where Dansko’s core values would remain intact and decided there was no better way to achieve this than by selling the company back to the very people who helped build it—her employees. Today, Dansko is proudly 100% employee owned through an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan).

Centric Software® (centricsoftware.com)

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

Centric PLM™, the leading PLM solution for fashion, outdoor, footwear and private label, optimizes product execution from ideation to development, sourcing and manufacture, realizing up to 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
Centric Planning™ is an innovative, cloud-native, AI solution delivering end-to-end planning capabilities to maximize retail and wholesale business performance, including SKU optimization, resulting in an up to 110% increase in margins.
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 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 Visual Boards™ pivot actionable data in a visual-first orientation to ensure robust, consumer-right assortments and product offers, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.
Centric PXM™, AI-powered product experience management (PXM) 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.