WALSALL, England — August 13, 2020 — Fast-growing womenswear brand Dancing Leopard looks to the future with Coats Digital’s Product Lifecycle Management solution, VisionPLM, to optimize, accelerate and connect its collection management, product development, and sourcing processes, increasing visibility, coordination and control.
Created in 2009, Dancing Leopard is a womenswear brand inspired heavily by its Indian and Balearic heritage. Through its garments, that uniquely combine vibrant prints with flowing fabrics, and its engaging digital presence, Dancing Leopard aims to inspire and empower women to be confident.
The garments are produced in a small factory in Delhi of which both companies share a long term relationship, while importantly, ensuring fair-trade standards are met.
Supporting Growth
The team at Dancing Leopard recognized that it had outgrown its largely manual systems and processes which had successfully got the company to this point, but were becoming increasingly time consuming and unable to provide the level of visibility, coordination and control necessary for the rapidly growing business. To help provide firm foundations for continued growth in the key areas of product development and sourcing, the team at Dancing Leopard searched for a PLM partner that could provide the essential combination of PLM functionality and industry best practice expertise.
“The journey we’ve been on to get the brand to where it is today has been amazing, but to support accelerated growth and to respond to the challenges of the industry, we needed to invest in a PLM solution,” said Jade Hildreth, founder and director at Dancing Leopard. “One particular objective is to improve the efficiency of the team, and replacing numerous and time-consuming spreadsheets with best practice digitized processes. This will reduce firefighting and instead allow time to focus on customer centric products, prints and fabrics, and key initiatives that will make a significant difference to the brand and the environment. In addition to this, process improvements, seeing ‘one version of the truth’ and closer supply chain management, mean that we will be able to plan and manage far more effectively. This will reduce the pressure on our supply chain partners and ensure that products meet delivery windows, and reach our customers far faster.”
VisionPLM is a fashion specific web-based solution which is tailored to suit the evolving needs of all businesses sizes, and is available on a Software as a Subscription (SaaS) basis, removing the need for additional IT hardware, infrastructure and expertise and allowing the solution to be scaled.
Dancing Leopard’s VisionPLM solution will include modules covering key business processes from initial design of products and prints; through development, sampling and costing to material and vendor sourcing and management; and end to end critical path management.
“It’s great to be working with Dancing Leopard, who are such an inspiring brand and have exciting plans for the future!” said Elliot Hurst, business development executive at Coats Digital. “Through several discussions we were quickly able to develop a strong understanding of their key business requirements, and it became quickly apparent that VisionPLM is a solution ideally suited to the immediate and future needs of their business. We look forward to working with the Dancing Leopard team on their digital transformation journey; and are confident that the unique ‘functional footprint’ of VisionPLM, from design inception to delivery, coupled with our wealth of industry experience will ensure a successful project.”
“Before VisionPLM, aligning material availability to production was a real challenge, which meant that we would be more reactive than proactive,” Hildreth said. “With VisionPLM, we have visibility of material stocks, designs and orders in a single solution, enabling us to quickly react to new trends and prints off catwalk and inspiration trips, and accelerate these through the product development cycle into production. Moreover, material requirement planning modules ensure that we are purchasing the right amounts of fabrics, benefiting from reduced purchasing costs, while integrated critical path management tools enable us to seamlessly coordinate this whole process.”
Posted August 18, 2020
Source: Coats Digital
