2018 October 29

Customer Talks with AMARO: Brazilian Fashion Market Top 5 Challenges

Brazil is a unique country. It’s home to 210 million inhabitants and a landscape that is vast and varied in terms of culture, nature and seasons. It is the diverse nature of the country that makes it so interesting when it comes to the fashion industry here which made up of 29,000 fashion related companies.

We caught up with Brazilian fashion brand and Centric PLM customer AMARO to find out why the fashion market in Brazil is unique, consumers changing demands in this country and how Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is key to addressing the challenges they are face in order to perform.

1. Diverse target audience – Due to its size and geographical location, if a brand wants to sell to the whole country of Brazil then they need to take seasons and cultural tastes per region into consideration. For example, it could be summer in the north when it’s winter in the south, so brands need diversity in their product ranges. Even how they categorize their products could vary per location.

2. Traditional processes – When it comes to clothing production in Brazil, Leandro Silva, Commercial Director for Brazil, Centric Software, describes it as “still quite traditional”. Processes are still very manual and clothing is still often handmade. There’s very little technology implemented in the market so when brands want to go faster to meet customer demands, it can be very difficult for them to move forward without the tools to do so at their fingertips.

3. Difficult economic period – Brazil is facing a difficult economic period which has greatly reduced in-store retail demand. Lodovico Brioschi, COO & CFO, AMARO says that despite this decline, e-commerce is growing quickly but it can be difficult to convince consumers that buying online instead of going into a physical store is safe, reliable and more convenient.

4. Logistics – Delivering products across the whole country within tight time frames is not easy due to long distances and poor roads. Managing logistics and time-scales is a huge task.

5. Find new talent – Another more recent challenge that many fashion companies are facing is find new talent. Millennials want to work for modern and innovative brands but with so many fashion companies still relying on traditional processes, this can be a problem.

Why AMARO decided to use Centric PLM

AMARO was frustrated with their fragmented product development process which involved working with several different spreadsheets, documents and emails. They turned to Centric PLM in order to harmonize the whole process of planning, designing, development and create a single source of the truth where everything could be organized.

Brioschi describes how Centric PLM allowed the business to create a workflow for processes with transparent, clear and consistent responsibilities and deadlines. Being able to integrate suppliers into their product planning and development process was another key reason for choosing Centric PLM. What Brioschi found really appealing was Centric’s cultural fit with the AMARO team in terms of their digital, modern and data-driven mindset. Centric’s experience in the fashion industry made implementation very quick and easy, the cloud-based PLM solution meant AMARO didn’t have to hire additional IT resources which allowed them to get PLM up and running quickly.

To discover more about AMARO’s Centric PLM journey, read the press release.