Zak! Designs, a leading manufacturer of licensed drinkware and tableware products, has reported an impressive 200% revenue growth following the implementation of Centric Software‘s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform.
The company shared its success story, highlighting how the adoption of Centric PLM helped streamline product development, improve collaboration, and support rapid business expansion without adding additional staff.
Growing Complexity Required a Smarter Solution
Headquartered in Washington State, Zak! Designs creates licensed and branded consumer housewares featuring globally recognized entertainment franchises. Its products are sold through major retail chains and online marketplaces worldwide.
As the company’s business expanded, managing multiple licensed product programs became increasingly complex. Zak! Designs needed a centralized platform to organize product information, improve operational efficiency, and support growth while maintaining lean operations.
One Centralized Repository for Product Data
To address these challenges, the company implemented Centric PLM as a single source of truth for product-related information.
By consolidating data into one platform, teams gained better visibility across product development workflows, reducing manual processes and improving collaboration between departments.
The implementation enabled Zak! Designs to scale its operations more effectively while maintaining productivity levels without increasing headcount.
Supporting Rapid Business Growth
According to the company, the adoption of Centric PLM played a key role in supporting its expansion and operational efficiency, contributing to a remarkable 200% increase in revenue.
The platform helped streamline product creation, manage growing product portfolios, and simplify the handling of licensed merchandise programs, which often involve complex approval processes and multiple stakeholders.
Importance of Digital Product Development
As consumer brands continue to launch products across multiple categories and licensing partnerships, product lifecycle management solutions are becoming increasingly important for maintaining speed, accuracy, and scalability.
For organizations like Zak! Designs, digital transformation in product development can help reduce operational bottlenecks, improve data accuracy, and accelerate time-to-market while supporting long-term business growth.
Leadership Quotes
“Without a formal system or single source of truth for product development, answering any kind of question was difficult… everything was always a surprise,” recalls Raymond Shill, Vice President of IT at Zak! Designs. The company wanted to standardize licensing approval processes and gain real visibility into blockers across projects.
With Centric PLM™, Zak! Designs has integrated Centric PLM to ERP, moved from scattered tools to a holistic, real-time view of projects and blockers, eliminated an inefficient item-numbering system (saving roughly a person-and-a-half of workload over a year), cutting item setup time by over 99% to under one minute —all while enabling 200% revenue growth without adding product development headcount.
In addition, the items that were previously listed as whole SKUs, are now broken out into full BOMs with detailed component data—adding no new staff to accomplish this large advance in granularity. “With Centric PLM, we now have a path for continuous improvement as we grow,” says Shill. “So far, that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”
“As Zak! Designs scales with global retailers and licensors, Centric PLM gives the agility and control that was previously lacking,” says Fabrice Canonge, CEO of Centric Software. “Complex workflows are digitalized and standardized to be able to respond faster to opportunities from retail partners—without proportionally increasing headcount.”
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