California Apparel News

Every apparel maker and retailer knows that technology these days is driving profit and efficiency.

The question is what kind of software systems do companies adopt and how does your company incorporate them?

Some of those answers were found at the 2013 Tech Conference West, organized by Apparel magazine recently at the Los Angeles Trade Tech College.

Stacey Shulman, chief technology officer for American Apparel, gave a down-to-earth talk about how she integrated five information-technology teams—that fought with each other all the time—into a cohesive unit that has been delivering amazing innovations using mobile applications and radio frequency identification at American Apparel stores.

“It was a pretty bad situation on the technology side,” she told a group sitting inside a small classroom auditorium on the large community-college campus. “Some groups were innovative, and others were old-fashioned in their thinking. Most of the things that were happening on the visionary side were coming from our CEO [Dov Charney].”

When she took over two years ago, she literally tore down walls between the five teams, bought new desks to replace the antiquated oak desks, reorganized the teams to be horizontal rather than vertical and set a goal to increase online sales.

“The team felt beaten-down, misunderstood and unappreciated. They were the ones getting blamed for everything,” she said, adding that if someone needed a desk moved, the IT team was called. “I came into the technology group and said, ‘You have to be innovative.’ Everyone looked at me with this burning rage.”

Shulman shook everyone out of their comfort zone, gave everyone a new job title and said they were going to be one of the most innovative teams in apparel.

She approached technology companies such as Qualcomm, Oracle and Intel to work with American Apparel, asking them to partner on new, innovative initiatives in which the technology companies received feedback on their new software and apps.

The result is that online sales have inched up from 9 percent of retail sales to 14 percent, Shulman said. Two years ago, the company had no mobile app. Now it has a sophisticated augmented-reality app that Qualcomm developed and called Vuforia. It incorporates a system with image recognition that turns an in-store digital sign into a digital ad and slide show. To the naked eye, the signs have only a product image visible, but when the signs are viewed with an augmented-reality app, information about the item’s price, sizes available in the store and customer reviews are displayed.

It can also be used to provide “silent sales” for loyalty customers who have downloaded the app.

Keeping pace with growth

For childrenswear and juniors apparel maker Evy of California, a batch of new technology applications was necessary to accommodate rapid growth. In the last five years, the company has expanded 20 percent a year. It now produces some 30 million units a year at factories located primarily in Asia.

Maria Azucena, the company’s information-technology director, said her job was to adopt a system that would shave lead times off production and allow the company to manage its growing orders for its licensed products made under the Hello Kitty, Minnie Mouse, Peppa Pig and Happy Bunny labels as well as expand its own Fleurish Clothing, California Talk and Kidture labels.

The company ended up integrating a suite of product lifecycle management (PLM), supply-chain management (SCM) and enterprise resource management (ERM) software developed by NGC, also known as New Generation Computing Inc.

“We manage diversified and complex products. For kids’ manufacturing, we develop collections to coordinate garments for our customers. And we have to place huge volumes across several different countries,” Azucena said. “Now everyone can see the same information, and it is updated on time. ... There is one source of data.”

The company also has to make sure the fabric used in its garments meets stiff U.S. environmental standards for childrenswear. All fabrics and trims have to be tested.

This year, the company is integrating its factories into the new software systems for faster production.

“Our goal this year is to reduce our production cycle to 100 days. So we are securing greige goods and yarns to quickly react to orders,” she said.

Integrated data

For Pendleton Woolen Mills, a venerable U.S. apparel company that produces most of its apparel and wool blankets in Oregon and Washington, getting its three separate divisions with their own record keeping on one platform was essential to saving time and money.

“We realized we had no central applications, and we had unsupported data out there that could not be ungraded easily or was on someone’s personal computer drive or their laptop at home. If that person called in sick, we didn’t have that data,” said Catherine Dessellier, a project manager at Pendleton. “We didn’t have a PLM system or a central place for work sheets and databases visible by all users who needed to see them to reduce cycle times.”

The company turned to Walter Wilhelm Associates to do a one-year analysis of the company’s operations to see what software needed to be integrated into the company.

After receiving various proposals, Pendleton ended up using Gerber Technology’s YuniquePLM Product Lifecycle Management software to integrate its departments and divisions.

“We are still on our first year,” Dessellier said. “Styles, colors and costing we are putting into ERP [enterprise resource planning], and trims go into legacy software.”

The new system has pointed out all that is good and bad in the company. “Visibility sometimes highlights some of your weaknesses,” Dessellier said, “but it is one version of the truth.”

Custom vs. off-the-shelf

At Halston, which moved its headquarters from New York to Los Angeles in 2011, Bryan Timm has been busy updating the technology in place from when the luxury womenswear company was located in Manhattan.

He recommended that fashion companies not try to customize their own software but use tried-and-true software programs already out there. “It’s likely that if you need it, other people need it,” he said. “You want to make sure you are advancing the company. We are fashion companies, not technology companies.”

Timm suggested fashion companies make their email system a top priority. Emails are used to exchange documents, store files and correspond with far-flung regions or with colleagues in the same office. “The most important application in the company is email,” he said. “If email is down, you hear about it.”

He advised making sure the email system is backed up. “We use the cloud,” he noted.

The Halston executive, who has also worked at BCBGMaxAzria and Guess? Inc., also recommended using a consistent data model and protecting that, too. “The data model is the glue connecting all the different applications and serves as the common language spanning departments,” Timm said.

One of Timm’s latest tasks is helping the growing company to incorporate a new mobile point-of-sale program at its new Halston Heritage stores opening soon in Los Angeles at the Beverly Center, in New York City on Madison Avenue, and at a shopping center in Troy, Mich.

“Technology affects the way we do business, and we need to acknowledge that,” Timm said. “If we don’t acknowledge that, it will bury us.”