March 21st, 2025

La Vie en Rose to Optimize Merchandise Financial Planning and Assortment Strategy for Improved Margins with Centric Planning

Leading Canadian lingerie and swimwear company adds Centric Planning to enable accurate decision-making and fuel rapid growth across all channels

CAMPBELL, Calif., March 24, 2025 – Centric Software® is pleased to announce that la Vie en Rose, the lingerie and swimwear company, has selected Centric Planning™ to optimize planning and enable accurate decision-making. 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 1985 and headquartered in Montreal, Canada, la Vie en Rose is a lingerie, sleepwear and swimwear company. The company acquired Bikini Village in 2015. Product lines include undergarments, lingerie, loungewear, sleepwear, swimwear, accessories and beachwear for women and men. La Vie en Rose has nearly 400 retail stores in 19 countries, with a franchise model in the Middle East and sells online through its website.

With approximately 50,000 SKUs across five product lines, the level of complexity is high. Until now, Excel-based planning has led to inefficiencies, manual data verification and limited visibility into financial and inventory planning. “We were looking to improve our efficiency in planning speed and the ability to drill down a lot more than Excel can,” says Eric Champagne, CIO at la Vie en Rose. “There isn’t enough governance around Excel and we aren’t confident in the accuracy of our information, so we’re always verifying the data. That’s the main reason we are going with an open to buy/merchandise financial planning system; we want to spend more time growing the business rather than working on spreadsheets.”

To find the right platform, la Vie en Rose conducted a full Request for Proposal (RFP) process, evaluating six different vendors, through demos, a comprehensive questionnaire and a 250-item-requirement list. Ultimately, Centric Planning stood out due to its deep retail expertise, integrated approach and ability to create a single source of truth for planning.

La Vie en Rose will leverage two key capabilities within Centric Planning:

Merchandise Financial Planning – aligning financial targets with in-season execution, enabling data-driven decision-making to maximize top-line and bottom-line performance.
Assortment Strategy – empowering teams to build customer-centric, localized assortments by leveraging real-time insights and AI-powered recommendations.

With merchandise financial planning, the company can set accurate financial targets and translate them into sales and margin plans. Buy targets can be aligned to merchandise receipts and stock projections. Champagne explains, “We need accurate information to make good decisions based on outcomes. We want to get the tools in place so we can focus on bigger things. Doing store planning on numbers which we can link back to merchandise financial planning is pretty cool. It will streamline the process between finance, between merchandise planning and also the procurement side of the business.” A single source of truth means that the data is true, so no longer needs to be verified, freeing up time to focus on optimizing in-season.

By adopting Centric Planning, la Vie en Rose expects “to reduce overstock, optimize markdowns as much as possible and make sure we can respond to the market,” Champagne notes. “Our intent is to get the right product to the right place on time. We are excited to see how the Centric platform—specifically the item planning portion of the Assortment Strategy module—will aid us in ensuring accurate sales forecasts and the necessary inventory flows to advance our key item business.” The assortment strategy aligns financial targets with what the assortments will look like and quantifies the number of options.

Other advantages of Centric Planning are end-to-end visibility, data-driven agility and AI-powered insights to optimize financial performance, align assortments with market demand and drive profitable, customer-centric decision-making at scale.

“We are thrilled to welcome la Vie en Rose to the Centric Software family,” says President of Centric Software, Fabrice Canonge. “With Centric Planning, la Vie en Rose’s teams will gain the agility, visibility and accuracy needed to navigate today’s fast-changing retail landscape. We are excited to see their success.”

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La Vie en Rose (www.lavieenrose.com)

Founded in 1985, la Vie en Rose has become Canada’s leading lingerie and swimwear retailer since its acquisition by François Roberge in 1996. The Montréal-based company, which employs more than 4,600 people, now has more than 400 stores worldwide – including over 300 in Canada and USA – under two distinct brands: la Vie en Rose and Bikini Village. la Vie en Rose is a true Canadian success story. Since 2004, it has continued to expand around the world, with 110 stores in 17 countries. The la Vie en Rose brand targets consumers looking for quality, affordable underwear, lingerie, loungewear, sleepwear, swimwear and beachwear. Bikini Village is the destination of choice for an exceptional selection of swimwear, beachwear and high-quality accessories for women and men. Bikini Village is proud to work with over 100 leading international brands.

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.