June 21st, 2024

Dovetail Replaces Legacy PLM System with Centric Software

Women’s workwear company sets the stage for future growth

CAMPBELL, Calif., June 24, 2024 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce that Dovetail Workwear has selected Centric PLM™to drive efficiency into their business. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Established in 2018 and based in Portland, Oregon, Dovetail Workwear was founded by a trio of women who saw the need for stylish, functional workwear for women. Designer Sara DeLuca created a slim fitting work pant with many pockets, and the business snowballed from there. The company sells tops, work shirts, pants, overalls and outerwear via retail stores and DTC on its website.

DeLuca describes the situation that led the company to seek a PLM solution. “We were living in the world of multiple spreadsheets and email exchanges. That led to discrepancies in information and opportunity for human error if something was updated in one place and not another.”

A focus on size inclusivity results in a high number of SKUs per style. DeLuca says, “Our SKU count is extremely wide, because we’re carrying this array of both waist sizes and inseam lengths.” This makes the design and development process very complex.

Product Design Assistant, Olivia Bakke says, “It’s clunky to send spreadsheets back and forth; the information needed to be in a place where everyone could see it all of the time.”

Dovetail initially implemented a different, less expensive PLM to tackle their issues. Unfortunately, the system wasn’t able to handle the compound sizing. This resulted in work-arounds to get the legacy PLM to do what they needed. DeLuca explains, “Essentially, that system was requiring us to recreate the products from scratch. The work-arounds were so onerous, we couldn’t even create a merchandise sheet for the season.”

Product Design Assistant, Olivia Bakke ended up having to do actual coding. “I was making these complex numbering systems to get products in the correct order. You couldn’t drag and drop. If we decided to put a different collection first in the merchandise sheet, I would have to redo the entire numbering system.”

That is when Dovetail turned to Centric PLM’s solution specifically tailored to small to medium brands. Bakke, who brought it in, says, “Centric PLM will ultimately enable us to grow long term. We can now easily access details that our customers seek—what kind of finishes are on the product, what thread we use, how many pockets. We store all of that data from season to season and it’s a lot of information.”

DeLuca says, “One of the major benefits of Centric is the flexibility to better manage our sizing.” Sample requests and tracking were scattered about, resulting in a time-intensive process. DeLuca continues, “To have the whole sample process be in one place, from the request to tracking the sample with a tracking number available to your sales team, is a vast improvement.”

Of Centric PLM, DeLuca enthuses, “It’s revolutionary. We’ve never had the ability for our customer service team to pull up the weight of a fabric or see how a spec is grading on a certain style. Or look to see if we made a spec change last season, because a customer noticed the waist is fitting a little bit bigger. It’s amazing to have that level of transparency. It is completely changing the way we work together. From a process standpoint, for the product team alone, it’s really quite profound.”

President of Centric Software, Fabrice Canonge says, “We are grateful that Dovetail has placed its trust in Centric Software. We are confident that our platform fits Dovetail’s needs and we look forward to seeing the association between our two companies grow as they do.”

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Dovetail Workwear (www.dovetailworkwear.com)

By women, for women, and with women, Dovetail Workwear is both a young company and the largest exclusively women’s workwear company in the northern hemisphere. Based in Portland, OR, Dovetail Workwear makes all-season, all-reason utility apparel that stands up to the job.

It all started with three women — two with muddy knees, one knee deep in textiles. Together they undertook the challenge to redefine women’s workwear. Fit for the Job. Capable of Anything. We are proud to be part of the women’s workwear movement: a growing segment meeting the demands of women in trades, natural resources, and creative pursuits. Dovetail believes that women deserve more choices in what they wear. We celebrate the female form without sacrificing the function of rugged apparel.

The Maven Slim was extensively field tested on real women from bike mechanics and construction workers to artists and firefighters. Their input helped hone Dovetail Workwear’s products and inspired our commitment to launch a complete apparel line. We are so proud to partner with the women and organizations in trades, physical, and outdoor occupations leading the women’s workwear movement.

Through the creation of high-quality apparel, Dovetail Workwear is providing tools that support women’s jobs and lives. We can’t wait for you to join us and get dirty!

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 fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home and related goods like cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail, 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 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 giving insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitively 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 Software’s market-driven, best-of-breed 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.