Beyond the Trend: How PLM Helps Address Your Fast Fashion Challenges

Fueled by ever-changing consumer trends and a desire for affordable styles, the fast fashion industry has witnessed incredible growth over recent years. But, while business is booming, the industry is not without its share of challenges.

Rapid production cycles lead to substantial waste and pollution, triggering backlash from environmental groups and concerned consumers, while rising costs and complex supply chains create operational headaches, too. As your fast fashion brand strives to be more competitive, efficient and transparent, you must address these critical issues.

But how? This blog explores how purpose-built product lifecycle management (PLM) software specifically designed for fashion and apparel businesses offers the answer. With comprehensive solutions to the challenges in the fast fashion sector—from sustainable material management and improved design processes to enhanced supply chain transparency and inventory management—fashion PLM systems empower brands to thrive in this competitive market.

What Is Fast Fashion?

The term “fast fashion” generally refers to the rapid design, production and distribution of high trend clothing at low cost—pulling ideas from the runway or celebrity closets and making them readily available to everyone.

These fashionable garments are typically made of less costly materials and offered at affordable prices with brands aiming to bring trendy styles to the retail market as quickly as possible to meet consumer demand. Since fast fashion collections are based on the most current trends, they do not follow a seasonal product cycle. Instead introducing new products every few weeks, encouraging the purchase and disposal loop.

The New York Times coined the term “fast fashion” several decades ago to describe industry pioneer Zara’s advantageous mission of getting a garment from design concept to store shelves in just 15 days. Since then, clothing purchasing habits have changed dramatically, with fast fashion trends being further accelerated by online retailers, social media and fashion influencers. Now, the fast fashion market is expected to be worth $184.96 billion by 2027 and Zara produces approximately 450 million pieces of clothing annually alone.

Fast Fashion Challenges Facing Your Brand

As a fast fashion industry professional, you know that keeping such a thriving market moving is no mean feat and involves several significant challenges. Let’s explore a few of the top issues your business is likely facing today.

1. Environmental Impact

As you know, the fashion industry is under scrutiny for its environmental impact. Reports say the industry is responsible for 10% of the global greenhouse gas emissions and 20% of industrial wastewater. These factors are becoming increasingly important to your potential consumers. Generation Z and millennials, in particular, tend to change their consumption patterns in an effort to live more sustainably. Considering this fact, it’s important for your brand to reduce its environmental impact where possible and be able to communicate this easily to consumers.

2. Social and Ethical Transparency

The ongoing protests of garment workers, particularly from developing countries, for better wages, treatment and working conditions are seemingly always in the news. Whatever the size of your business, such activities can delay production and cause huge losses. And there’s not just the immediate impact on profit to think of, but also your brand image and reputation. Ensuring your business is beyond reproach when it comes to social and ethical practices will help you avoid negative press, regulatory penalties and consumer boycotts. To provide the necessary transparency, you need greater visibility from beginning to end of your product lifecycle.

3. Global Supply Chain Disruption and Inefficiency

Your fast fashion business relies on complex supply chains to quickly get clothes from design to store shelves. With so many moving parts and third parties involved, this system can quickly become inefficient, with struggles in communication and coordination leading to waste and delays. Add to this, disruptions beyond your control such as material shortages, transportation delays, geopolitical conflict or natural disasters and your fashion supply chain can quickly become unwieldy. To counter this instability, you need to prioritize agility in your processes and trim the fat, so your business is operating as efficiently as possible everywhere else, offsetting any supply chain disruptions.

4. Keeping Up With Customer Demands

Known for speed and flexibility, fast fashion companies thrive on constantly creating new trends and keeping up with ever-changing customer desires putting immense pressure on designers, manufacturers and retailers alike. Predicting trends accurately can be difficult, sometimes leading to overproduction and unsold inventory, or conversely, failing to capitalize fully on a major trend that your competition is able to react to quickly.

5. Rising Cost of Raw Materials

Between shortages and the lingering effect of inflation increases, the higher cost of raw materials is continuing to affect the operational efficiency and profitability of fast fashion manufacturers like you. But, with the appeal of fast fashion for shoppers lying primarily in its affordability, increasing your product prices in response to the increased cost of doing business is a risky strategy. Instead, you need to find ways to reduce costs in other areas to improve efficiency and maintain profit margins.

6. Communication Silos and Data Inaccuracies

In order to get the right products to market at the right time, your entire fast fashion business must be in lock step—from design and development to production and marketing. But with different teams using various systems and an abundance of data flooding your operation, ensuring that everyone has access to the same reliable, accurate, real-time data is challenging. And, whether it’s reduced efficiency, wasted resources, production delays or lost sales, the consequences of silos and data inaccuracies can be severe.

How a Fashion PLM Addresses Your Fast Fashion Challenges

Every fast fashion brand faces the above challenges while meeting consumer demand for rapid product turnaround. Thankfully, purpose-built apparel software can help you overcome blockers and power streamlined end-to-end operations.

In particular, fashion PLM software integrates all aspects of your product development process, from initial design to final delivery. This integration streamlines workflows, reduces errors and speeds up the entire cycle. By having a unified platform for all product data, your brand can make informed decisions quickly, ensuring that products reach the market faster without compromising efficiency, quality or ethical standards.

Let's explore below how a fashion PLM can specifically address these challenges faced by the fast fashion industry.

1. Sustainable Material Management

Having a fashion PLM system helps you track compliance and sustainability throughout the product lifecycle, from raw materials to sales. Not only does it facilitate more sustainable sourcing by aiding in the selection and documentation of suppliers with good sustainability credentials, but it empowers you to iterate on designs more quickly to test more sustainable materials in your products.

In addition, manufacturing process management functionalities and packaging modules offered by advanced PLM systems can also help optimize efficiency, minimize waste and prioritize environmentally friendly processes.

2. Data Accuracy With Transparency

Fashion PLM software centralizes the management of your entire product lifecycle, enabling seamless collaboration between your design, development and production teams. With all your crucial product information stored digitally in one convenient platform, you remove silos, ensure data accuracy and improve accessibility of key information.

This visibility means you’re easily able to track the origin of materials, labor practices, supplier certifications and compliance documents, ensuring adherence to ethical and sustainability standards. Plus, with accurate, accessible information, your brand can provide complete transparency to satisfy consumer demands, building trust and enhancing brand reputation.

3. Enhanced Supply Chain Management

When facing supply chain disruptions, having the fashion PLM system that creates a central hub for all your data and controls the process from the initial concept to final delivery is invaluable. This increased supply chain visibility and control, combined with the fact that the best PLM software should help you reduce design and development time by roughly 35% empowers you to get products to market faster, increasing your agility and business resilience.

A good PLM for fashion and apparel businesses can also manage and monitor supplier performance, ensuring that materials are delivered on time and meet quality standards—helping to reduce delays and disruptions in your supply chain.

4. Improved Design and NPD Processes

Implementing PLM software for your fast fashion brand significantly enhances design and product line planning by incorporating a raft of specialized features to enhance productivity and innovation in your new product development (NPD) teams. For example, designers can quickly access and iterate past designs, address compliance, streamline material approvals and track sample evaluations. The best systems will also offer integrations with preferred designs tools, including supporting 3D models, all of which allows your designers to create products that align with your consumer demand.

Many PLM systems also support mass customization options, enabling your brand to offer personalized products that enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Collaborative drawing and design tools allow multiple team members to work simultaneously on projects, ensuring consistency and efficiency throughout the product development cycle—so you can consistently bring great new designs to market without compromising efficiency.

5. Increased Efficiency and Profitability

By streamlining various aspects of your design, production and supply chain processes, an industry-specific fashion PLM software helps your brand achieve increased efficiency—countering rising costs and boosting profitability. Once such aspect is a sourcing and costing, where a PLM can introduce automation that helps you purchase fabrics and trimmings in larger volumes at better prices.

In addition, with accurate forecasting of your products’ viability, you can avoid overproduction and stockouts, thereby reducing excess inventory costs and improving cash flow. Real-time data and analytics offered by your apparel PLM system also empower you to make smarter strategic decisions to further optimize resource allocation, maximize productivity and minimize waste—all of which contribute to cost savings and maintain profitability.

6. Centralized Data Management

By integrating all product-related information into a single platform, your fashion PLM software ensures that data is consistent, up-to-date and accessible to all relevant stakeholders exactly when they need it. This centralization eliminates data silos, reduces errors and enhances communication between design, development, production and marketing teams. As a result, your entire product lifecycle becomes more efficient and transparent.

In practice, this means your fast fashion brand can easily track real-time progress, monitor performance and identify potential issues before they escalate—so you can remain on top of everyday issues and keep your operation running smoothly. This holistic approach also allows for comprehensive analytics and reporting, enabling you to adapt to market changes and consumer demands quickly and make better strategic choices.

Weave Success Together With a Robust Fashion PLM System

Your fast fashion success relies on your ability to balance rapid production and operational efficiency with affordability and transparency for consumers. The challenges are immense: increased scrutiny on ethical sustainability practices, global supply chain disruption, rising costs and the never-ending evolution of consumer trends. All while operational struggles such as inventory overload and communication silos add to the complexity.

You need a way to tame the complexity. That’s where choosing a cloud-based PLM system tailored to fashion and apparel businesses comes in—centralizing data, streamlining workflows and enhancing collaboration so your brand can meet the demands of quick turnaround times, while adhering to various standards and maximizing profitability.

At Aptean, we speak your industry language, so we understand what you need for the success of your fast-fashion business. Aptean's fashion PLM software is integrated with our tailor-made apparel enterprise resource planning (ERP) and shop floor control software to bring you enhanced capabilities to respond to future trends and reduce production costs, leading to increased customer satisfaction and profitability.

Want to learn more about Aptean Apparel PLM and other cutting-edge solutions for the fashion industry? Keep reading how to build your PLM system business case or request a personalized demo now.