June 7th, 2016

Outward Hound Raises The Woof With Centric Software PLM

A golden retriever, sporting an Outward Hound orange life jacket, runs through shallow ocean water near a pier on a sunny day. The background features a clear sky with scattered clouds and beachfront buildings. This lively pup truly raises the woof with its joyful antics!

LOS GATOS, California, June 7, 2016 – Outward Hound, a leading retail dog and cat toy and accessory company based in Denver, Colorado, has chosen Centric Software to provide its product lifecycle management (PLM) solution for both its Outward Hound and Petstages brand product lines sold at global retailers. Centric is the leading PLM solution for fashion, retail, outdoor, footwear, luxury and consumer goods companies.

Outward Hound’s mission is to improve the lives of pet parents and their pets with meaningful innovations across several dog and cat categories including toys, chews, feeding, games and gear.

The company was founded in 1995 by Kyle Hansen when he and his wife realized that it was difficult to find good-quality toys and gear for dogs in pet shops. The company produces both soft goods such as dog lifejackets, plush toys and snow boots, and hard goods such as chew toys, games and award winning slow feeders. Outward Hound recently acquired PetStages, Bionic and Nina Ottosson, with more acquisitions in the future.

Outward Hound is going through a phase of rapid growth and had been looking for a PLM system that would be able to create efficient, scalable processes to improve the time to market of products. Jared Mosher, COO of Outward Hound, had previous experience with Centric.

“We are growing incredibly fast with the acquisition of new companies and are trying to make everything we do a scalable process,” explains Mosher. “Rather than adding more and more people, we want to set up systems and processes that would allow us to grow more efficiently.”

Mosher continues, “I was very impressed with Centric’s professionalism and their solution when I was involved in Centric implementations at two previous companies. When I came to Outward Hound, we were in search for a PLM solution and it was a no-brainer.”

Outward Hound anticipate that Centric PLM will help improve efficiency across the entire product development team.

“Speed to market is the name of the game for us,” says Mosher. “We really want to drive innovation and get products out to the marketplace as fast as we can, making sure that they are high quality and meet pricing requirements. We must ensure that the data we have is ‘one truth’, which is what’s so great about a Centric PLM solution. Once this is implemented we’ll have more accurate information and we’ll have it faster.”

“Centric will allow us to configure the system and that’s what we’re looking for; we need to be flexible and we need to be scalable. We’re a growing company and who knows where we’re going to be two years from now?” says Mosher.

Outward Hound will implement Centric 8 PLM from June 2016 across their full product development team including both the hard goods and soft goods teams. At a later stage, they plan to extend the system to vendors and incorporate other Centric 8 innovations, such as mobile applications.

“We’d like to extend a warm welcome to Outward Hound and we’re delighted to begin working with a company in such an interesting niche,” said Chris Groves, CEO and President of Centric Software. “We are particularly pleased to work with Jared Mosher from Outward Hound, who has placed his trust in Centric for the third time in different companies.”

Outward Hound (outwardhound.com)

Outward Hound® is a Riverside Portfolio Company that is an award-winning innovator, creator, manufacturer and distributor of the highest quality toys, games, gear and feeders for pets and pet parents.

Learn more at outwardhound.com

Centric Software, Inc. (www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around` the world, Centric Software builds technologies for the most prestigious names in fashion, retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Its flagship product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning, product development, sourcing, business planning, quality and collection management functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric Small Business packages extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings tailored for small businesses.

Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion and Apparel PLM. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100 Global list in 2013 and 2015.

Centric is a registered trademark of Centric Software. All other brands and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.