Swatchbook has announced a partnership with Centric PLM, to provide its fashion clients with access to over 100,000 materials, and allow them to speed up time to market and reduce waste.
The cloud-based material sourcing, management and design collaboration platform Swatchbook will now be integrated with the Product Lifecycle Management software Centric, which provides solutions to design, develop, source and sell products such as apparel, footwear, sporting goods, furniture, cosmetics, food and beverage, and luxury.
Swatchbook offers a range of digital materials, from suppliers from around the world, allowing its fashion customers to experiment with different colours and materials virtually.
Before uploading a digital material on the online library, the Swatchbook team digitises it in 2D and 3D and examines its physic properties, so, Swatchbook said, clients can have a realistic visualisation of the material, which allows them to measure and test it digitally.
Then customers can design their products and visualise them in 3D and AR before going to manufacturing, reducing waste of resources and materials.
Swatchbook said the integration will be instantly deployable for users, who should now also be able to create their own colours.
“With our focus on the fashion industry, we have seen Centric Software emerge as the leader for PLM,” said chief product officer at Swatchbook Thomas Teger.
“Partnering with Centric Software and integrating Swatchbook’s material samples directly in PLM, will speed time to market while also reducing waste. Designers will be closely linked to production and vice versa via a dynamic live link to ensure that data is always up-to-date.”
VP of product at Centric Ron Watson said: “This partnership is an exciting development for apparel and footwear brands moving to a 3D environment.
“With this integration, the information associated with each material goes straight from the supplier to Centric PLM through Swatchbook, boosting efficiency in product development workflows by eliminating manual data input. This opens up a plethora of possibilities to feed designers’ creativity.”
