As a response to changing external circumstances, fashion brands have settled for limited, generic collaboration and whiteboard tools that now exist independently of their technology estates – creating separate islands of data and decision-making, and undermining visibility, accountability, and efficient communication.
As part of a new push to increase speed to market and provide product teams with the right tools to align merchandising, design, and cross-functional teams to a common vision, brands like Swarovski are now replacing those generic whiteboards with a flexible, extensible architecture that embeds visual working in essential enterprise systems like PLM – reducing the time its teams spend creating presentation by 90%, cutting overall time to market by 20%, and reducing their reliance on standalone spreadsheets by 90% as well.
To better understand where this drive for better (and better-connected) visual boards originates, and how alternatives to generic tools are delivering value for some of the world’s best-known brands, The Interline partnered with Centric Software to analyse the market, and to understand the key use cases delivering value across the go-to-market lifecycle for Swarovski and other leading companies.
This editorial is also accompanied by a replay of a live online event, hosted by The Interline and Centric Software, and featuring Swarovski’s Global Process Manager & PLM Owner, Alicia López, who shares an inside perspective on the company’s use cases for the family of visual boards that are fit for purpose in the fast-changing environment of modern fashion.
In fashion, visuals matter. From the stories brands put in front of consumers, to the critical ways that internal audiences communicate fast-changing creative and commercial decisions, visual communication is the industry’s central touchstone.
But that touchstone doesn’t exist in isolation. Thanks to accelerating go-to-market calendars and a difficult macroeconomy, brands now need to combine that visual storytelling and collaboration with connected tools that unlock growth, time to market, profitability, and that allow them to thrive in an evolving consumer market.
The teams that need to interact with those tools also face new pressures. Merchandisers and category managers need to make real-time planning, pricing, and inventory decisions. Designers must create and communicate compelling product and collection visions, working within compressed cycles. And multi-disciplinary teams need a consistent, connected reference frame to allow them to understand, align behind, and execute on go-to-market plans.
As a stopgap solution, over the last few years, fashion and consumer product brands made a rapid transition from gathering those teams around physical cork boards, to using off-the-shelf analogues like Miro, and common productivity tools like Powerpoint, to work together on, and then share and present from, a common visual workspace.
Despite being generic, industry-agnostic, and feature-limited, these platforms then took quick root in fashion, because they provided a turnkey, freeform, multi-user canvas, an easy way to bring inspiration and assets from the web and other sources into a common location, and essential tools to manipulate images, remove backgrounds, and other time-consuming tasks.
But what was intended as a temporary solution ended up defining brand and retailer workflows, and today generic boards and presentation tools have become a large part of fashion’s visual communication toolkit – even though they provide limited visibility, lack frameworks for industry-specific decisions-making, and result in the siloing of collaboration away from the platforms where key decisions in product design and development are made.
To see these limitations in action, consider how often off-the-shelf boards need to be supplemented by spreadsheets and supported by manual data entry, as a brute force way to align their contents with the centralised systems and communications channels, like PLM, where the rest of the product journey resides.
To provide a viable, connected alternative solution, Centric Software has rearchitected the foundations of a visual communication platform, to better align with the strategic priorities of fashion, footwear, cosmetics, and consumer goods companies. Their approach was not just to build a like-for-like creative canvas with closer links to the enterprise tech estate, but to reframe the idea of a visual board as a business engine, by establishing an underlying architecture that can be adapted to power applications and experiences that have quantifiable, department-specific benefits across the product development journey.
To begin with, Centric set out to build better boards by providing a clear uplift on those industry-agnostic solutions that have become data dead-ends for so many brands. Every instantiation of Centric Visual Boards offers bi-directional integration with live data from PLM and other enterprise systems – with vendor-agnostic APIs that allow users to combine real-time data, images, and other assets from both Centric and non-Centric systems into a single workspace, meaning that changes made in those systems are instantly reflected in visual boards and vice versa.
But enhancing the functionality and integration of existing boards is only part of the picture, and the team at Centric have also worked with customers from across fashion, footwear, and consumer products to build applications for the extended product journey, on the same integrated, extensible architecture. And from that foundation, best practice templates and products have emerged organically, driven by industry demand.
Visual Whiteboard is a blank canvas, reflecting the wide-open use cases for traditional foam-core boards — giving product teams a way to collaborate, communicate intent and align on seasonal direction. It enables teams across design and merchandising to exchange feedback while keeping discussions grounded in real enterprise data.
Visual Concept Board is a dedicated creative sandbox designed for early-stage ideation and exploration. It enables design teams to experiment freely with inspiration, color, materials, prints and silhouettes, curating and iterating on concepts, and backed by the same data foundations.
Visual Assortment Board translates the same visual framework to decision-driven workflows, with interactions tailored for planners, merchandisers and category leaders. It brings together product, pricing and performance data to support assortment building, scenario analysis and trade-off decisions based on real-time insights.
Omnichannel Showroom Board extends visual, data-anchored storytelling into the commercial execution phase. It equips wholesale and retail teams with turnkey presentation tools to showcase curated assortments, support buy meetings and align selling narratives across channels, knowing that all content is connected to live enterprise data.
Each Visual Board is based on the same flexible foundation, and each of them is informed by use cases developed by world-leading brands and retailers.
Multinational master jeweller Swarovski, for example, has worked with Centric Visual Boards throughout their development, and has been instrumental in shaping their evolution, with best practices informed by their own results.
When the Swarovski team was more reliant on off-the-self boards, the company realised its product marketing team was spending close to half their time creating presentations that were used to showcase collection concepts to internal and external stakeholders. Working from that realisation, and adopting the data-backed visual framework of Centric Visual Boards as a first port of call, Swarovski was able to reduce the time involved in creating presentations by more than 90%.
From there, as part of a strategic transformation, the Swarovski team expanded their use of Visual Boards that has seen the company reduce its overall time to market by 20%, and cut its reliance on separate spreadsheets by more than 90% – simultaneously allowing their teams to focus on decisions and collaboration activities that directly contribute to product outcomes.
As well as documenting this journey in a written case study, Swarovski also provided a live demonstration of how it uses the different packaged templates and the flexible, underlying foundation of Centric Visual Boards during a webinar this summer – hosted by The Interline and Centric Software.
In that live event, Alicia López, Global Process Manager & PLM Owner at Swarovski, showcased the different ways that the brand aligns its teams with a common visual reference frame, how comprehensively the company has changed the way it presents to internal and external audiences, and how far its experts have reframed the way they make visually-steered decisions. “[Visual Boards] provide a visual, dynamic overview that minimizes human error and lets teams work much more efficiently” said Lopez.
As Swarovski demonstrated during that live event, and in the case study, the common foundation of a flexible canvas, embedded in the wider technology ecosystem, from which templates for application-specific boards can be configured, is both a powerful replacement for generic white boards and a foundation for a more scalable model for visually-oriented transformation.
According to Centric, working with those same tools, other companies have also been able to measure key results: reducing the time needed to prepare and present assortments from days to minutes, and cutting up to 75% of sample review cycle time. And those same benefits are available to companies of all shapes and sizes, across the full spectrum of fashion, retail, and consumer goods categories – whether they choose to start with pre-configured templates based on best practices established by Swarovski and other leading brands, or whether they opt to work with Centric’s experienced industry teams to configure their own.
When we now look to the 2026 retail climate, the environment that fashion operates within is not likely to become more stable or more predictable, and as major brands like Swarovski have demonstrated, substituting a different approach to visual collaboration can be the key to mitigating some of that uncertainty – allowing product teams to work with a foundation of better boards.
And fashion brands can also tap into a clearer definition of what better visual boards actually look like. They are part of the existing technology ecosystem, with full centralisation and accountability for decision-making. They’re flexible and endless as a creative space, but anchored in real business data. They enable creative and commercial choices to be made as close to real-time as possible, with the confidence that those choices are captured and consistent. All around, better visual boards can be the foundation for a better way of bringing products to market.
Find out more about Centric Visual Boards, and the use-case-driven templates built from that common architecture, or arrange a demonstration. Or read the case study and watch the live webinar replay, from Swarovski, Centric Software, and The Interline.
