PTC & MakerSights Increase Product Creation Efficiency and Consumer-informed Assortment Decisions with Best-in-class Integration.

Two leading companies continue to collaborate to automate data exchange and accelerate decision workflows for retail brands.

PTC is proud to announce the results of its continued collaboration with MakerSights: the development of an off-the-shelf standardized ‘connector’ that provides seamless integration between the retail industry’s most widely used and #1 ranked PLM solution, FlexPLM, and the leading voice of consumer partner to product teams, MakerSights.

Leveraging PTC’s Flex Connect solution, the integration instantly synchronizes product data from FlexPLM to the MakerSights platform in real time. This allows product creation and merchandising teams to have consistent data across platforms, reducing risk of errors and eliminating manual work.

Both FlexPLM and MakerSights share a common goal of helping brands build and maintain winning assortments. This integration enables companies to connect consumer feedback on concepts and in-development products with the relevant product data in PLM to better inform pricing, investment, and go-to-market decisions. Brands like Madewell, who have used this connector, have benefited by gaining iterative feedback throughout the evolution of a line, ensuring a more informed development process without any slowdowns.

“Integrating MakerSights with FlexPLM has made testing new products with consumers and finalizing assortments a much more seamless and efficient process at Madewell,” said Madewell Divisional Merchandise Director Grace Brooks. “We are now able to move from evaluating newness to finalizing an assortment more quickly and with far greater confidence, because we’re making decisions based on product-specific feedback from our target consumers. This is a game-changer for us in terms of productivity, efficiency, and scalability.”

This integration removes restrictive data silos and establishes a seamless connection between two pivotal digital tools along a brand's value chain, fostering cross-functional collaboration in assortment management within a unified digital environment. By seamlessly feeding data from FlexPLM and automating workflows, product information in MakerSights remains up to date and set up time is reduced by 75%.

"The collaboration between MakerSights and FlexPLM is pivotal in today’s fast-moving retail product development landscape, streamlining processes for designers and merchants, thereby enhancing agility and expediting the delivery of winning products to market," explained Bill Brewster, Senior Vice President, and General Manager of PTC’s Retail Business Unit. "We’re continuing to see a growing need for retail brands to establish deeper integrations that foster seamless connectivity across solutions, teams and processes. The digital thread provided by this integration is essential for accelerating cycle time and improving sustainability and margins—objectives that are top of mind for nearly every brand."

Now, product, merchant, and cross-functional stakeholders can access a comprehensive, always updated perspective of in-development assortments, integrating consumer sentiment data and internal stakeholder feedback. This holistic view of the assortment enables product and merchandising teams to expedite decision making across the product life cycle, mitigating the risks associated with overproduction.

“Our collaboration with FlexPLM, underscores MakerSights’ focus on delivering relevant, actionable insights to inform product decision-making across the product life cycle. This integration ensures that MakerSights consumer insights are contextualized in a brand's product data ensuring when they reach the hands of decision makers all that’s left to do is make an informed decision.” MakerSights Co-founder and CEO Dan Leahy.

For more information, reach out to retail@ptc.com.