For a long time, product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions were the preserve of the planet’s largest brands. Eventually the barriers to entry lowered and the centralisation, connection, and collaboration potential of PLM became more accessible to middle market companies and SMEs.
But the scope and spread of PLM kept expanding. And this has led, in some cases, to stretched functional footprints, heavy enterprise customisation, high costs, and complexity in both implementation and everyday use.
An ascendant group of digital-native, quick-growing brands is now starting to look for something different: lean, focused, feature-complete design and development platforms geared for speed, affordability, and digital-native collaboration.
The Interline spoke to Preston Plowman, CEO and Co-Founder of Onbrand, a PLM and project management platform designed to fit that new mandate. Plowman shares his take on how the flywheel of fashion is changing, and how Onbrand’s reinterpretation of PLM was specifically built to streamline and supercharge smaller brands in growth mode.
Lately, cornerstone brands and luxury houses have borne a lot of the brunt of the uncertain economy. As a result, emerging and scale-up brands have been increasingly setting the agenda for fashion’s near future.
Part of their competitive edge comes from smaller, more agile companies’ ability to operate closer to the consumer. Without the benefit of heritage or huge scale to rely on, these are businesses that thrive on having a hyper-targeted offer, a clear understanding of market demand, and the agility to meet it through rapid design, development, production, and distribution.
But these brands also live collection-to-collection, where every choice – from colour and fit to material and target margin – is mission-critical, and where moment-to-moment decision-making governs success much more strongly than it does for big enterprises.
According to new research by MMGNET and The Interline, fashion businesses of all shapes and sizes see profitability and margin protection as their foremost challenges for 2025 – and this fundamental concern will count double for smaller brands, whose balance sheets are more directly tied to the success of their latest product or collection.
The same research also shows that the vast majority of fashion professionals – working for small and big businesses alike – also believe that technology will be either essential or quite important to overcoming those challenges.
But despite this universal pressure and the common expectation that software will help provide a release valve, smaller brands have often continued to rely on ad-hoc solutions for the core tasks of product design, development, and sourcing.
Traditional product lifecycle management, when its vast footprint is condensed down for smaller brand implementations, has made some inroads into the SME market. But Excel, email, and other off-the-shelf tools are still the primary means for emerging brands to manage their projects, plan collections, share and align on technical specifications, and manage samples, tasks and deliverables.
“The reason so many fast-growing brands have defaulted to using spreadsheets to manage their collections, is that spreadsheets are faster and easier than the enterprise systems they’re used to—systems that are full of friction at every turn, from implementation and adoption to upgrades and expansion,” says Preston. “This is the same root cause for why so much essential communication and critical decision-making is also done outside structured enterprise systems: because those systems don’t properly accommodate the reality of work, so conversations end up happening through ad-hoc channels like email, PDFs, and WeChat.,” Plowman, CEO and Co-Founder of Onbrand.
“Unlike big enterprises, which have dedicated PLM teams and specialised departments, scale-up brands are run by people who share a powerful vision but need to wear multiple hats to achieve it. These are not teams who need over-stuffed big business applications… but neither are their needs being met by generic productivity tools.”
Plowman believes that the key to overcoming that friction lies in re-evaluating what capabilities this new cohort of brands actually needs from product design and development software, and architecting modern solutions around those key features – only expanding beyond that remit when that demographic of nimble, digital-native brands demands it.
“Having core functionality well catered-for is what drives almost all of the ROI and benefits from PLM adoption for emerging brands,” Plowman add. “With legacy solutions, there’s a risk we’ve observed of brands getting so wrapped up in a box ticking exercise, trying to go after all the extended features being thrown at them, that they lose sight of whether the key capabilities they need to solve their immediate pain points are there, and that they’re in a form that their real end users will actually interact with.”
For brands in the startup and scale-up stages of their growth, that concentration on key capabilities could be an interesting proposition. These are companies that have potentially looked into adopting PLM before, but have subsequently been put off by high barriers to entry in terms of cost, complexity, and time to value – or companies that saw PLM platforms being advertised on the basis of capabilities intended for multinational businesses, which perhaps felt superfluous to their needs.
“There are two realisations that a lot of fast-growing companies arrive at,” says Plowman. “The first is that the surface of traditional PLM is incredibly broad, but the platforms themselves aren’t usually very modular: so whether you think a particular process should be part of PLM or not, you’re going to be paying for it under the traditional model. The second is that, even for the biggest companies in the world, no single solution can cover every process and hold every piece of data. So the right mindset is to build software with a clear, defined purpose – and then to make sure that it connects with other best-in-class tools.”
“For PLM,” Plowman adds, “we think being ‘fully-featured’ means providing the right environment to support real fashion teams in transforming design and development. That means we, at Onbrand, start where people’s ideas spark, and where creatives build storyboards. We offer intuitive, powerful material, components, and product libraries. We cover colour management, technical development, sizing, bill of materials, technical specifications and sampling. We build environments that support the real shape of modern, dynamic, real-time collaboration, and we provide universal visibility into where things stand in the design and development workflow at any time, and what needs to be done next. We do all that well, and then we intelligently hand off to the places that products need to go next so they can succeed. The point shouldn’t be to do everything: it should be to give ambitious, agile people a single source of truth, and a way to drive the most efficiency possible from core product development processes – a smart, streamlined way to innovate and introduce new styles at speed.”
But while the expanding footprint of traditional PLM can be off-putting for younger brands seeking a more straightforward uplift to their core processes, it’s by no means the only reason that small to medium brands have continued to use industry-agnostic productivity tools as their primary tools.
Another key consideration is the price of cloud-hosted, massively-adopted ecosystems like Google Drive, Gmail, Microsoft One Drive and Teams, Slack, Miro et al. Broadly speaking, these platforms are more affordable and simpler to adopt than single-sector and specialised solutions, and they are more universally adopted as a result.
When this is contrasted with typical PLM implementations, these can be service-heavy (correlated to the aforementioned customisation, but also linked to the deeper change management required to cover the full spread of features and functions) and time-consuming. In practice, the delta between a large PLM deployment and the roll-out of a tailored solution like Onbrand can, Plowman told us, be the difference between the best part of a year and a matter of weeks.
Smaller companies have also embraced off-the-shelf productivity tools because of how deeply embedded they have become in the modern technology ecosystem. Material developers and sourcing teams turn to email and chat apps because they are universally used both in-house and across the value chain. Creative and commercial teams gather around Miro boards because of how easily they can share live access with colleagues and partners.
This, Plowman says, is where a distinction can be drawn between PLM platforms that have their roots in the pre-web era and have been steadily adapted to cater for modern demands, and solutions – like Onbrand itself – that were built on contemporary technology stacks and designed for digital-native users.
“Building a truly modern PLM, for us, means a few key things. First is the technical level. The companies looking for a new solution in 2025 are familiar with the cloud-first architecture of those major productivity platforms, and they’re accustomed to how intuitive those solutions are to use. So they’re making IT decisions that prioritise uptime, security, data structure and integrity – and they’re making usability decisions based on how much a solution can empower teams, rather than getting in their way. We built Onbrand on the principle that modern software – in the architectural sense, and from the perspective of usability and capability – has a direct line into not just everyday satisfaction but better strategic execution. Giving people software that tackles their key challenges, brings disconnected teams together, and is intuitive to use is what we’ve seen lead to an organic change in behaviour. It’s about giving people a PLM platform they want to use, instead of one they have to.”
Plowman is clear, though, that a modern PLM platform for fast-growing brands has to be feature-complete where it counts.
“These are also teams that have deep, rather than broad, requirements for the tools that they’re going to trust with their essential product data and the success of their brand. Fashion has so far had to choose between heavyweight enterprise PLM or very lightweight chat layers and applets to annotate photos. Our approach was instead to build a solution based on our observations of real startup and scale-up workflows, which means blending the right capabilities – dashboards, calendar management, critical paths, assortment planning, approvals and more – with the right user experience.”
This mix of ability and usability should, Plowman added, also extend to external users, providing brands and their partners with live, secure sharing of product data and a clear, centralised method of communicating around that data – something Plowman refers to as being “like Google Docs for your product data”.
And similarly to the ubiquitous productivity tools that Onbrand and other modern PLM platforms are intended to supplement (or in some cases replace), the ability to get that product data out of the system and into complementary tools is vital. This is why, according to Plowman, Onbrand comes complete with a documented data dictionary and universal connectors for bridging PLM with 3D tools, ERP platforms, sustainability hubs and more – alongside several prebuilt integrations, including to colour standards such as Pantone and Coloro, design tools like Adobe Illustrator, and commerce channels like Shopify.
But unlike email, spreadsheets, and other off-the-shelf tools that deliver value by the nebulous definition of “productivity” or “efficiency,” Plowman is clear that for a PLM platform to meet the high demands of emerging brands, it must deliver on measurable metrics month-on-month.
“Brands in growth mode need real results. We’ve seen real customers cut out half the time they used to spend building tech packs after adopting Onbrand, and we’ve measured quantifiable improvements in the speed at which our customers like Birddogs, Rylee & Cru, and The Black Tux are able to bring new styles to market.”
As fashion reckons with a potential turning point, after years of disruption and economic uncertainty, these results could matter a great deal to growing brands who have the opportunity to potentially gain more market share from established brands and retailers who are weighed down by legacy technology.
About our partner: Onbrand is affordable, agile, PLM and project management software designed for fast-growing brands who need focused, feature complete core business software. As well as offering a best-in-class “source of truth” for fashion, footwear, and apparel brands, Onbrand is architected to scale.
