Vivienne Westwood needed a way to streamline its global design and product development operations. With a diverse range of product categories including apparel, footwear, jewelry, textiles, accessories, leather goods, and bridal, the company sought to centralize data, improve collaboration, and enhance process visibility. Streamlining these complex workflows was crucial for maintaining brand value and accelerating time-to-market.
About the company
Vivienne Westwood began designing in 1971 along with her then partner Malcolm McLaren in London. At the time they used their shop at 430 Kings Road, London, to showcase their ideas and designs. With their changing ideas of fashion came the change of not only the name of the shop but also the décor. It was in 1976 when Westwood and McLaren defined the street culture of Punk with Seditionaries.
By the end of the seventies Vivienne Westwood was already considered a symbol of the British avant-garde and for Autumn/Winter 1981 she showed her first catwalk presentation at Olympia in London. Westwood then turned to traditional Savile Row tailoring techniques, using British fabrics and 17th and 18th century art for inspiration.
1989 was the year that Vivienne met Andreas Kronthaler, who would later become her husband and long-time design partner, as well as Creative Director of the brand. In 2004 the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, hosted a Vivienne Westwood retrospective exhibition to celebrate her then 34 years in fashion – the largest exhibition ever devoted to a living British fashion designer. In 2006, her contribution to British Fashion was officially recognized when she was appointed Dame of the British Empire by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2007 was awarded the ‘Outstanding Achievement in Fashion’ at the British Fashion Awards in London.
Vivienne Westwood is one of the last independent global fashion companies in the world. At times thought provoking, this design house is about more than producing clothes and accessories. Throughout her life Westwood captured the imagination and raised awareness of environmental and human rights issues around the world, which continues today through The Vivienne Foundation. With a design record spanning over fifty years, Vivienne Westwood is now recognized as a global brand and Westwood herself is remembered as one of the most influential fashion designers, and activists, in the world.
AT A GLANCE
Mission
Provide Vivienne Westwood’s merchandisers, designers and go to market teams with the power to create iconic products, with speed and efficiency, just-in-time, to be on trend.
Best Thing About Vivienne Westwood
Iconic and timeless designs, embodying a strong, holistic approach to sustainability across various fronts, including materials, packaging, supply chain, carbon emissions, waste, craftsmanship, and heritage.
Best Thing About FlexPLM
Empowering the most successful companies to create products across every category—from fashion and apparel, accessories to footwear—with total reliability, enterprise-grade security, and rock-solid performance.
Bottom Line Impact
Centralization of data, improved collaboration through highly visual and efficient line sheet capabilities, and automation of workflows and processes ensure that product information is always current and accurate, resulting in faster time to market and more data-informed decisions.
Business challenges
Vivienne Westwood was challenged with the complexity of developing and bringing to market a wide range of styles and SKU’s, ranging from apparel and footwear to jewelry, textiles, and bridal wear.
They needed a comprehensive PLM solution to centralize critical planning and product data and enhance visibility into their processes to understand where a product is at each stage of its development lifecycle. With multiple internal teams working on different aspects of product design and development, maintaining a single source of truth for accurate product information was challenging, due to manual and time-consuming methods.
Before introducing the new PLM platform, for example, the brand's design office in the U.K. and production office in Italy had to create tech packs and exchange data mainly through email and spreadsheets. These manual practices could lead to duplicate data entry, poor collaboration internally and with international factory partners, as well as missed deadlines.
In summary, Vivienne Westwood needed to optimize their product development lifecycle and go to market processes to ensure that they could launch new products faster, without compromising on quality or brand identity.
They also required a local services partner to help deploy and upgrade the PLM solution.
Further, Vivienne Westwood needed to integrate their product development processes with their existing SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution to ensure seamless flow of data and information across different departments.
Giorgio Ravasio, Country Manager, Vivienne Westwood Italy.
The solution
To overcome their design and product development challenges, Vivienne Westwood implemented FlexPLM, a highly visual, secure, intuitive, multi-geo, multi-dimensional PLM platform. By doing so, this centralized data and processes improved visibility, collaboration and consistency across their diverse product categories, internal teams, and global operations.
Designed with end-user efficiency in mind, FlexPLM puts critical processes, data, and actionable insights at Vivienne Westwood’s user’s fingertips. An easy-to-use Excel-like capability provides users with role-based or personalized views of their style data to efficiently enter and modify. In addition, google-like search capabilities provide quicker access to material, color, supplier, and factory data to improve overall speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
As a services partner, Lutech CDM’s expertise and proven track record in the global fashion industry and with PLM were instrumental in implementing FlexPLM and having it deliver business value in a short timeframe. Working in close partnership with Vivienne Westwood and PTC, Lutech CDM played a pivotal role in Vivienne Westwood’s recent seamless upgrade to the latest version of FlexPLM that was delivered on-time and on-budget, without users experiencing downtime or disruption.
Giorgio Ravasio, Country Manager, Vivienne Westwood Italy.
Key benefits
Today, Vivienne Westwood leverages PTC’s “out-of-the-box” FlexPLM solution and industry leading capabilities to enhance design efficiency, improve real-time collaboration, and accelerate their product development lifecycle, maintaining their position as a global fashion leader.
More specifically, FlexPLM provides Vivienne Westwood’s merchandisers, designers, and developers with a highly visual and accurate line board overview of their collections resulting in faster, more data-informed design and product development decisions.
Looking ahead, Vivienne Westwood plans to join the PTC Retail Sustainability Working Group, the first of its kind, as they aim to continue their leadership position around sustainability and compliance by integrating PLM into their ESG strategies and goals.
Now, with a trusted single source of truth and fully connected processes and systems, Vivienne Westwood continues to create high-quality iconic products faster with improved margins, realizing its mission of Buy less. Choose well. Make it last.