Itsperfect: "Fashion management looks to the cloud for solutions"

In the not so distant past fashion folks would fax hand-written orders to their suppliers and factories, use spreadsheets to create product costings and painstakingly keep track of sales and inventory the manual way.

Why? Because technology came late to fashion. At the dawn of the e-commerce revolution, many brands, in particular luxury businesses, waited on the sidelines before embracing digital sales and launching online stores, let alone digitize their processes.

There were limited tools available to enhance workflow and save time, certainly there wasn’t a comprehensive, all-round solution to support fashion companies across their main activities of design, sales and manufacturing.

Enter Dutch fashion tech startup Itsperfect, who have quietly been revolutionizing tailor-made cloud solutions to fashion businesses everywhere with their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Whether for wholesale, retail, e-commerce, private label or managing the most complicated supply chain, Itsperfect supports the process from design to execution and everything in between.

Today it seems nearly impossible to manage an apparel business without some sort of software to streamline and operate the most complex and taxing processes of running a fashion company. Yet even with the technological advancements available, Itsperfect was a pioneer to launch a 360-degree, 100 percent cloud solution to conquer all of the above, and more.

FashionUnited spoke with Itsperfect founder Stefan Methorst about the ever-changing industry and the launch of the company’s new website in October.

Cloud-based solutions for the fashion industry are relatively new. Why do you think it has taken so long for the fashion industry to catch up to technology?

“The reason is that existing companies in the cloud solutions space would have to re-build their applications completely from scratch. Current software is largely out-dated and not very compatible with the advancement of web-based cloud technologies.”

Itsperfect has come a long way since it launched in 2015 and your new website will be unveiled on October 1st. How do you stay innovative when technology is constantly evolving?

“We launch a new version every 8 weeks based on the needs and feedback from our customers. Since we’re a fully cloud-based software solution, every customer is working with the same version and therefore we’re not developing and optimising for one user but for our complete customer base.”

The supply chain, product management and wholesale channels are highly complex systems to manage, with larger apparel companies employing vast teams to navigate this space. How does Itsperfect simplify these processes?

“With our integrated PDM and PLM modules we make sure our customers can organise all their item processes in one system. Integrated modules have the big advantage of having all the data available as they are already in the system. There are no connections, no loss of data and real-time insights.

Sustainability is radically transforming the fashion industry and retailers need to predict demand and optimise their inventory movements to avoid waste and excess stock. How do you see Itsperfect technology making a difference?

“All the information in our system is real-time, so we can manage the stock over multiple platforms. There is no need to make a stock reservation for a specific platform since they can check the stock real-time to meet sustainability goals, which in turn helps reduce usage, overproduction and waste.”

Fashion retail has been one of the hardest hit sectors in recent economic times. The “fashion apocalypse” refers to the many businesses that have closed or are downsizing, or cannot compete with online stores. As brands continue to closely examine their portfolios, do you think there are opportunities in the sector?

“Well, our focus is fashion wholesale, but also support wholesalers with own physical stores, and to streamline process to enable greater sales. We try to help and support both wholesalers and retailers, to connect their systems with for example EDI or our integrated Omni Channel platform.”

Fashion may be one of the most complex and challenging industries, but every cloud has a silver lining, especially those that are solutions-based. The Itsperfect website is relaunched on October 1st. For more information go to www.itsperfect.io.