inRiver

The fashion industry buys, sells and markets products for specific periods, i.e. seasons. At least two times a year the seasons change and the assortment with it, often for spring/summer and fall/winter. Today most fashion companies tries to become more agile and have faster response to market demands, thus the seasons tend to become shorter and the assortment changes more often. Many fashion companies are aiming to create and market new assortments up to 12 times a year in order to better follow the market when it changes. This does not only relate to what’s fashionable, but also to weather and other factors. This of course leads to a need for faster and more frequent updates of the related product information. In many cases popular products are re-used or re-purposed between seasons, called “carry over” or “re-run”, often in new colors or with minor changes. If the the product line changes more frequently, more “carry overs” from the base assortment are needed. In this case the product information must also be re-used and/or re-purposed. 

inRiver PIM Fashion Edition contains smart features to overcome these challenges. Using Fashion Edition it becomes easy to work with assortments for upcoming seasons while updating the information in the current assortment without having to duplicate data or managing changes in existing web sites, web shops or catalogs. The system takes care of all this through versioning of relations and smart business rules. This means that the users can concentrate on delivering the best possible content and avoid changing current seasons while updating the upcoming ones. This is a truly unique and valuable functionality for companies that work with assortments containing “carry overs” and needs to use the information in many channels and markets. 

Many industries face the challenge with measurements, but the fashion industry also needs to convert these into specific sizes. Sizes are different in different markets witch makes it necessary to handle this as “Unit of Measure” (UoM). Just like we need to handle metric and imperial values for different markets we need to handle sizes in the same manner. Support for handling sizes for different markets is inbuilt in inRiver PIM Fashion Edition that helps you manage sizes and measurements for different markets in an easy way. Using the UoM-support users can stop thinking about conversion as it can easily be handled by the system, thus being presented correctly in all channels for all markets. Variants is also used in other lines of business, but not as frequently and as complex as in the fashion industry where a variant often is divided into sizes as well as color and/or material. inRiver PIM Fashion Edition built to handle this in all aspects. 

An assortments is a collection of products. This is often marketed with a specific selection of products for each collection, season and market. In many cases the products can be the same but the colors and/or material differs between markets. Sometimes assortments contains “carry overs” from last seasons assortment with changes in color and/or material. This can also be handled by Fashion Edition, for all channels and markets without duplicating any data or worrying about updates having impact on the current assortments. 

In addition to having specific functionality the vocabulary of the system is adapted to fit the needs of the fashion industry. Image conversion can be done with exceptionally high quality to deliver images that gives the customers the best possible feel for the products, way beyond what is normally expected from a PIM system. All this goes on top of inRiver’s full fledged PIM system to create a solution specifically designed for the fashion industry. This means that the system also can handle product information for retail, wholesale and manufacturing with a state-of-the-art feature set and the ease of use and simplicity that is already built into inRiver PIM.