2025 Growth Playbook For Footwear Brands

Footwear brands today face an evolving landscape of challenges—from rising production costs and fast-moving trends to the growing demand for sustainability. These hurdles, while daunting, offer significant opportunities for brands to innovate and scale.

This practical guide is designed to help emerging footwear brands navigate five key challenges—Sustainability, Rising Costs, Supply Chain Disruptions, Digital Transformation, and Process Inefficiencies. With actionable strategies and real-world examples from successful companies, you’ll learn how to turn hurdles into growth and build a sustainable, competitive advantage in 2025.

Read on to discover:

• Proven strategies to boost efficiency and streamline operations.
• Actionable tips on building a sustainable and competitive brand.
• Real-world success stories from brands like INOV8 and Tamara Mellon, showcasing how the right tools can fuel growth.

Read on for customer stories about how some of these companies leverage Centric Solutions.

Consumers increasingly demand sustainable and ethical footwear, but this is alongside a need to adhere to strict environmental regulations. Governments worldwide are responding with new legislation to drive sustainability.

In the US, California’s Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024 mandates apparel and footwear producers implement take-back, reuse and recycling programs, encouraging sustainable design. Similarly, New York’s proposed Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act would require major brands to disclose supply chain impacts, including emissions, fair wages and water usage, while outlining plans for improvement.

Meanwhile, European legislation is also shaping the industry. France’s AGEC law enforces ‘sorting labels’ to eliminate waste and support the transition to a circular economy, and the European Footwear Confederation is pushing brands to innovate while meeting ambitious sustainable environmental targets.¹

These policies are reshaping footwear business models and pushing companies toward responsible, forward-thinking design and production.

Strategy: By using sustainable materials, processes and certifications, footwear companies can differentiate their brand while still ensuring compliance.

Actionable tips:
✓ Use a product lifecycle management (PLM) system to track and manage materials, labeling and packaging.
✓ Integrate supplier certification data for full transparency.
✓ Address new requirements, e.g. end-of-life planning at product conception (material selection and design for disassembly).
✓ Access accurate cost updates and visibility into standardized Bill of Material (BOMs), to evaluate profitability and shape well-rounded collections.
✓ Leverage an end-to-end platform that records a product’s sustainability and environmental attributes throughout its lifecycle, to increase transparency across the supply chain to comply with stringent digital product passport requirements.
✓ Get actionable insights on sustainable trends, consumer preferences and competitor offerings to align product strategies with eco-conscious demands.

Stepping into success: INOV8 gains full visibility of costs
Founded in 2003 in the British Lake District, INOV8 has become one of the world’s leading brands for off-road runners, exclusively using Graphene in the rubber outsoles and foam midsoles of its shoes, enhancing both performance and durability.

Challenge: With big ambitions for future growth, INOV8 recognized the urgent need for a modern PLM solution to unify data in a ‘single source of truth,’ efficiently manage its product lifecycle processes and drive key sustainability goals.

Solution: Centric PLM™ is crucial in managing INOV8’s products from the initial design until the product enters their ERP. Teams are particularly looking forward to using the Calendar module for a smoother production process, as well as the Material Library to make faster and more informed decisions.

Result: ”With this functionality, a designer can easily avoid a material that has a fault flagged because it will be logged in the system. There will be full visibility of costs too, which will speed decision making.” — Mark Hutchinson, Merchandise Director, Inov8

Increased raw material prices, higher labor costs and stringent environmental regulations are eroding profitability. This challenge forces designers to seek more cost-effective materials and innovative manufacturing techniques while maintaining quality and sustainability.

Additionally, tariffs and global economic fluctuations further complicate budgeting and pricing strategies, making it essential for brands to balance affordability with profitability.

Strategy: Streamline design, sourcing and production to optimize resources.

Actionable tips:
✓ Monitor and manage costs by identifying cost drivers using PLM data dashboards. Track expenses to find cost-saving opportunities and regularly update cost data to stay aligned with budget goals.
✓ Optimize material use by analyzing and selecting cost-effective materials that meet design and quality standards.
✓ Get access to real-time data and historical product information to enable teams to make quicker and more informed decisions.
✓ Use real-time pricing analytics and competitive benchmarking to optimize pricing strategies, identify margin opportunities and maintain profitability.
✓ Connect design, merchandising, product development and assortment planning teams into a single visual workspace to streamline collaboration, and reduce time and effort spent on manual processes.
✓ Leverage Centric Visual Boards™ for pre-season and in-season planning.

Stepping into success: Tamara Mellon makes collaboration strides
As the co-founder of Jimmy Choo, Tamara Mellon knows the luxury world inside out. She launched her namesake brand in 2016, redefining luxury with a direct-to-consumer model that offers shoes and handbags designed ‘by women, for women’.

Challenge: The luxury footwear brand’s process was manual and time-consuming, so Tamara Mellon needed a PLM solution to provide one central location for the cross-functional (and global) team to collaborate.

Solution: The brand selected Centric PLM SMB, Centric Software’s SaaS, cloud-based PLM solution for emerging brands, based on its intuitive interface and Centric Software’s experience in fashion and footwear.

Result: “Having our product-related data in one centralized location is a huge step forward. Centric Footwear PLM is a flexible solution that gives us the ability to scale our team, make our development process more efficient, improve our data and analytics functionality, and—longer-term—provide the foundation for improving our to-market speed and replenishment capabilities as the business grows,” — Louis Graci, Director of Production and Product Development, Tamara Mellon

Supply chain disruptions have an impact on most industries, but global apparel and footwear companies face particularly complex challenges. According to McKinsey, factors such as fluctuating demand, material price volatility and trade regulations are reshaping the sourcing landscape.

Simply put, supply chain instability leads to production delays, stock shortages and frustrated consumers —threatening brand loyalty and profitability. To stay competitive, footwear brands must embrace digital solutions that enhance visibility, improve forecasting and enable proactive decision making in an unpredictable market.

Strategy: Leverage digital solutions to optimize sourcing strategies by mitigating risks through technology-enabled supplier management, real-time data analytics and proactive planning.

Actionable tips:
✓ Use PLM to track and evaluate supplier performance.
✓ Develop contingency plans for key materials and components.
✓ Access data on product assortment and inventory trends across the market, enabling adjustments in sourcing and production strategies.

Stepping into success: Dan Post finds the perfect fit
Founded in the 1960s, Dan Post boots are synonymous with superior fit and fashion-forward design. Their handcrafted method starts with the finest exotic skins and premium leathers handled by the finest designers in the world. The company produces approximately 150 new styles each year through their two brands: Dan Post and Laredo.

Challenge: With an increasing amount of sampling, sourcing, materials and design data to juggle, the company needed an ‘all-in-one’ ERP and PLM solution.

Solution: Dan Post considered several options, but selected Centric PLM™ based on past experience, user-friendliness and ability to scale with the business.

Result: “One of the great things about Centric is that we can easily update it when we’re on the go. Because we will have all the information in one central place we will be able to generate line sheets very quickly. Our production and sourcing teams will be able to track material usage and hold factories accountable for the time period it takes to get samples made.” — Stephanie Greenfield, Director of Product Development, Dan Post

Many emerging footwear brands struggle to keep pace with industry giants due to outdated processes, disconnected systems and manual workflows. Without digital tools, brands face inefficiencies in product development and market responsiveness—hindering both growth and sustainability efforts.

Strategy: Implement a scalable PLM system to streamline product development, enhance collaboration and drive innovation. Leverage digital transformation to improve operational efficiency, increase agility and meet sustainability goals.

Actionable tips:

✓ Adopt a future-ready PLM to centralize data, reduce errors and accelerate time-to-market.

✓ Partner with an experienced change management provider like Centric Software to facilitate seamless implementation and team adoption.

✓ Leverage AI for design efficiency and use Centric AI Fashion Inspiration™ to accelerate design ideation.
✓ Harness Centric Market Intelligence™ and AI-powered analytics to gain real-time insights into customer preferences, competitor strategies and sales performance.

✓ Benefit from a 9-12 week PLM implementation to get up and running quickly.

Stepping into success: Manolo Blahnik puts best foot forward

Staying true to his early days, the iconic shoemaker Manolo Blahnik still sketches each design by hand, spanning a 50-year career that now stretches across more than 40 countries. While the core business is still women’s shoes, Manolo Blahnik also produces bags, belts, socks, accessories and men’s footwear.

Challenge: The Manolo Blahnik team grew significantly within a short period of time. The company needed a PLM solution that could seamlessly integrate with accounting software, a PIM system, an inventory management platform and a wholesale ordering system. The system would also need to automate processes, reduce duplicate data entry and share data efficiently with suppliers.

Solution: Manolo Blahnik has implemented core modules of the Centric PLM platform choosing a ‘back-to-front’ implementation—starting with the production side and the supplier portal before tackling product development and design.

Result: “Centric PLM has linked all of the various technologies we use from design to retail, completing a digital transformation across our operations.”
— Bruno Oghittu, Digital and Logistic Director, Manolo Blahnik

Inefficient workflows and disconnected tools hinder collaboration between design, production and merchandising teams—leading to delays, higher costs and errors in product development.

Strategy: Streamline product development workflows by centralizing data, improving communication and integrating advanced tools to optimize efficiency and decision making.

Actionable Tips:
✓ Centralize all product-related data in a single platform to reduce manual data entry, errors and miscommunication for faster time-to-market and better cross-team alignment.
✓ Visually collaborate on product concepts in real time and link them seamlessly to PLM.
✓ Empower designers with AI-driven trend analysis to incorporate the latest styles into collections.
✓ Analyze market trends, pricing and competitor offerings to guide design and product strategies effectively.

Stepping into success: BRUNT creates efficiency at scale
Founded in 2020 in Massachusetts, BRUNT is unique in how it collaborates with trade workers to develop high-quality products for the job site that make real workers’ lives easier. BRUNT is growing rapidly and has recently branched out into wholesale in over 100 retail outlets nationwide.

Challenge: BRUNT recognized that its teams were being held back by manual processes and scattered data.

Solution: After a rigorous selection process, BRUNT selected Centric PLM™.

Result: ”Having one source of truth for product design and development information is key. We’ll be able to pull existing materials and components from the Centric library, which makes life a lot easier when we’re creating new products. Everything from generating information for purchase orders to having visual line plans and documents for marketing will take significantly less time, and it will definitely cut down on errors.”— Bruce Todtfeld, Senior Director of Footwear, BRUNT

While many emerging footwear brands may see industry challenges as obstacles, successful leaders view them as opportunities for innovation and growth. By embracing digital transformation, SMBs can scale efficiently, differentiate their brands and stay competitive in an evolving market.

Key takeaways

1. Prioritize sustainability. Utilize eco-friendly materials, adopt responsible manufacturing practices and obtain certifications to stand out while ensuring compliance.
2. Optimize design, sourcing, and production. Streamline operations to reduce waste, improve efficiency and maximize resources.
3. Strengthen supply chain resilience. Mitigate risks with technology-driven supplier management.
4. Implement a scalable PLM system. Modernize and accelerate product development while enhancing team collaboration and agility.
5. Centralize data and improve workflows. Leverage integrated digital tools to enhance communication, optimize efficiency and drive smarter decision-making.

This reference guide summarizes how Centric Software solutions empower emerging footwear brands to overcome these challenges and thrive:

By combining Centric PLM™ with additional Centric Software® tools, emerging footwear brands can overcome inefficiencies while enhancing collaboration and making data-informed decisions—leading to faster product launches, reduced costs and increased competitiveness in a fast-changing market.