ST. LOUIS May 22, 2018
Fashion technology house BeProduct is pleased to unveil a successful Product Lifecycle Management (“PLM”) initiative in partnership with design-to-delivery apparel company Stars Design Group Incorporated.
The culmination of a rigorous selection process, Stars Design Group (hereafter “Stars”) chose to work with BeProduct in 2017, and today the company has around 30 active users of BeProduct’s eponymous social product development platform, in offices around the world.
Founded in 2000, Stars undertakes design, development, and distribution processes on behalf of a range of clients – working on brands, private labels, licensed products, uniforms and other product categories, primarily in menswear. Through its client networks, Stars’ products are sold in the USA, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and the company currently designs and develops thousands of styles per year across its different accounts.
Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, Stars also maintains overseas operations in India, China, Ethopia, and Vietnam. Through these satellite offices, the company oversees manufacturing at around 70 different hand-selected factories, working to ensure that quality and margin are achieved within a clear code of practice.
Stars began its search for PLM as a way of managing the complexity of multinational design, development, manufacturing and distribution for multiple clients, before discovering the limitations of more traditional solutions – as CEO & President Bret Schnitker explains:
“One of the biggest challenges of our business model is the diversity of our customer base – particularly because we’re so heavily involved in design, development, and the creation of technical specifications for many of those customers. Traditional PLM solutions are almost universally set up to deal with single brands and rigid categories, whereas our clients all have different identities and different quality, performance, and delivery requirements. Today’s world requires us to be both agile and organised, so what immediately appealed to us about BeProduct was the ability to develop products for multiple clients on one platform, quickly and in an organised way.”
A veteran of several PLM implementations in previous roles, Schnitker and his team were also drawn to BeProduct’s affordability and accessibility. “With systems like PLM, historically the up-front investment was so massive that businesses felt burdened once they’d purchased a solution,” he explains. “People recognise that they need PLM in order to maintain performance and grow, but the result is often a complex implementation with heavy customisation, meaning the solution quickly falls behind the times. But with BeProduct, the whole solution is cloud-based, with an affordable monthly fee and no up-front investment in software or infrastructure. Being built that way also means BeProduct can be a living, breathing thing; as a user, you sign in one day to discover that an updated module or all-new functionality is available and ready to go. And that’s just so much more exciting than having an expensive, static solution that you’re stuck with until a milestone release is manually installed.”
As well as the strengths of the solution itself, Stars relished the opportunity to work closely with the BeProduct team to help shape the development of the solution – something that BeProduct Founder Daniel Pak believes is essential for any software vendor in the modern fashion market. “We are thrilled to consider Bret and his team as equal partners,” Pak says. “We understand the value of agility, and our goal is to build the most flexible tool for modern fashion businesses, making sure that a single solution can be deployed on the cloud and then configured, non-destructively, to meet the needs of almost any business model.”
Following a successful implementation and on-boarding process, BeProduct and Stars continue to collaborate, with future functionality in the areas of 3D and supply chain collaboration targeted for deployment very soon.
To find out more about the future of social product development, visit http://www.beproduct.com.
To learn more about Stars Design Group’s innovative apparel technology solutions, visit https://starsdesigngroup.com.
About BeProduct (http://www.beproduct.com)
Built by the brains behind some of fashion’s biggest technology install bases, BeProduct helps brands and retailers inhabit the things they make. Every sketch; every stitch; every step of design and development. Headquartered in New York City, hosted on the cloud and designed with collaboration at its heart, our PLM solution is uniquely flexible and as full-featured as market leaders’, with none of the big enterprise bloat.
For just $75 per user per month, and no upfront investment in infrastructure, our customers get their own private social network, uniting people with a passion for product. Designed around streams, likes, notifications and comments, BeProduct blends instant intelligence with an intuitive experience to create a place for creativity without compromise.
Manage apparel, footwear and accessories. Use our bulletproof API to design custom apps without a line of code. Create colour palettes by uploading street style snaps. Handle complex compliance requirements. Work more closely together on design and development. Do more of what you love, and let us worry about everything else. Sidestep the false choice between implementing off-the-shelf solutions or custom-building at huge cost. BeProduct is PLM done differently.
About Stars Design Group (https://starsdesigngroup.com)
Stars is a leading apparel design and manufacturing group that supports coveted lifestyle apparel brands in the continuing quest to maintain their exclusive brand equity and grow their footprint globally, while giving equal service to visionary start-up brands, partnering with each according to its needs. It’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it.
In today’s ever-changing global marketplace, we understand how difficult it can be to find a manufacturing relationship that can deliver cost-effective, ethically responsible products, with minimal interruptions.
Our industry expertise and proven track record of superior service has helped us to establish numerous relationships that have evolved into client friendships spanning years. Our objective is to always listen to and understand our clients objectives and challenges, making our partnerships that much stronger. We feel it’s important to learn from our mistakes as well as our successes, and to incorporate those lessons into strategic improvements that will be mutually beneficial to both Stars and our clients.
Our handpicked staff and manufacturing partners, rigorous training regimens, and strict guidelines, ensure that our clients are partnered with one of the strongest, most forward-thinking companies in the industry.