One source of truth for merchandising and product development
A full-service creative agency runs product development and merchandising for retail and consumer brand clients in Airtable: sample request tracking with delay flagging, prototyping workflows, seasonal calendar generation, style-color level costing and buyer sheets, vendor collaboration with tech pack generation, and production checklists through post-order tracking. Product Development, Merchandising, Materials, Production, and Sourcing teams replaced fragmented spreadsheets and documents with one connected system.
The problem
Product development ran across a patchwork of spreadsheets, notebooks, and shared documents. Style numbers got entered by hand in multiple places, version control broke down constantly, and nobody had a reliable view of which samples were running late.
Vendors had no consistent way to collaborate on tech packs or costing, and production handoffs happened through email instead of a shared system, which meant delays surfaced only after they had already cost the schedule time.
What they built
Product Development, Merchandising, Materials, Production, and Sourcing teams built a connected Airtable base that tracks sample requests with automatic delay flagging, manages prototyping workflows, and generates seasonal planning calendars.
The base handles style-color level costing and buyer sheets, gives vendors a collaboration portal for tech pack generation, and carries the workflow through production checklists and post-order tracking, all linked to raw materials tracking with fabric threshold checks and connected to NetSuite and Shopify.
The outcome
Leadership gets delay visibility before a slipping sample becomes a missed deadline, and the single source of truth for the product lifecycle replaced the manual entry and spreadsheet reconciliation that used to eat hours every week.
Vendor collaboration scaled without adding headcount, margin visibility improved because costing and buyer sheets live in the same system as the samples they price, and production handoffs streamlined once every team worked from the same records.
Inside the solution
Merchandising and Product Development Operations
Quality & Manufacturing Operations
- Sample request tracking and delay flagging
- Prototyping and sample management workflows
- Seasonal calendar generation
- Style-color level costing and buyer sheets
- Vendor collaboration and tech pack generation
- Production checklists and post-order tracking
- Raw materials tracking and fabric threshold checks
- Fragmented tools across spreadsheets and documents
- Duplicate style-number entry and manual version control
- Lack of visibility into delays and bottlenecks
- Vendor access and collaboration challenges
- Manual tech pack creation
- Delay visibility for leadership
- Unified product lifecycle tracking in a single source of truth
- Reduced manual entry and elimination of spreadsheets
- Scalable vendor collaboration
- Improved margin visibility
- Streamlined production handoffs
- Product Development
- Merchandising
- Materials Production
- Sourcing
- NetSuite
- Shopify
- Figma
- Vendor portals
Merchandising and product development operations
Run a whole client product programme in one base: log style numbers once, track sample requests with automatic delay flags, cost at the style-color level with a linked bill of materials, collaborate with vendors on tech packs, and carry every drop through production checklists and post-order tracking. Automations open fit review tasks on sample intake, advance style-color costing when a sample is approved, raise reorder tasks when fabric drops below threshold, and email a weekly late-sample digest, while AI fields draft tech packs, buyer sheet copy, delay risk notes and vendor scorecards.
From fragmented spreadsheets to one product development system
Copy the templates
Centralize samples and calendars
Connect vendors and systems
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Each sample request is a record with expected and actual dates. When a sample slips past its expected date, it surfaces automatically in the views that leadership and merchandisers already check, instead of requiring someone to notice manually.
Vendor collaboration happens through a shared view tied to the style record, and tech packs generate from the same structured data instead of being rebuilt by hand for every style and color combination.
Costing lives at the style-color level in the same base that produces the buyer sheets, so a cost update reflects everywhere that style appears instead of requiring a second document to be updated separately.
Style numbers are entered once and referenced by every linked table, from sampling through production and post-order tracking, instead of being retyped into each new spreadsheet or tool along the way.
Yes. It integrates with NetSuite and Shopify so product, cost, and order data stay consistent across the teams and systems that need it, without a separate manual export step.