One product master that replaced a rigid legacy PLM
A retail operations technology and software company builds retail PLM and PIM applications in Airtable for fashion and apparel: product master data, SKU and barcode generation, bill of materials and tech pack creation, costing analysis, and e-commerce syndication. Merchandising, Product Development, Design, Buying, Supply Chain, and E-commerce now share a single source of truth instead of a rigid legacy interface and duplicate Excel entry.
The problem
Product data lived inside a rigid, clunky legacy PLM interface that was slow to change and expensive to run, so much of the actual work happened in Excel instead. That created errors, duplication, and version control issues every time a spreadsheet and the PLM system fell out of sync.
Non-PLM users across merchandising and buying had poor visibility into where a product stood in development, and the legacy system's high cost and long implementation cycles made it hard to extend to the people who actually needed the data.
What they built
Merchandising, Product Development, Design, Buying, Supply Chain, and E-commerce now share one Airtable base covering product master data and SKU and barcode generation, a BOM and material library, sampling and fit session tracking, costing, pricing, and margin analysis, tech pack generation with supplier portals, and syndication to the e-commerce storefront.
The base connects to the organization's e-commerce and ERP systems, so product records move from design through supply chain into the storefront without manual re-keying. Every product, material, and tech pack carries linked history instead of living in a standalone file.
The outcome
Time-to-market for a new product dropped from about three weeks to about one week, and total cost of ownership fell well below what the legacy PLM and comparable PIM tools required. Manual rework and duplicate data entry across teams were largely eliminated.
Broader team adoption followed because non-PLM users could finally see product status through simple interfaces, giving design, merchandising, supply chain, and e-commerce a shared, cross-team view from concept to storefront and avoiding a large-scale ERP implementation cost the organization would otherwise have faced.
Inside the solution
Retail PLM & Product Master Data Management
Product & Engineering
- Product master data and SKU/barcode generation
- BOM and material library management
- Sampling and fit session tracking
- Costing, pricing, and margin analysis
- Tech pack generation and supplier portals
- E-commerce PIM syndication
- Rigid, clunky legacy PLM interfaces
- Excel-based product data causing errors and duplication
- Poor visibility for non-PLM users
- High cost and long implementation cycles
- Overwrites and version control issues in the legacy system
- API rate limits and sync performance issues
- Faster time-to-market
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Reduced manual rework and data entry
- Broader team adoption via simple interfaces
- Avoided a large-scale ERP implementation cost
- Single source of truth across design, merchandising, and supply chain
- Cross-team visibility from design to e-commerce
- Merchandising
- Product Development
- Design
- Buying
- Supply Chain
- E-commerce
- E-commerce platform
- ERP system
- Cloud storage
- Data warehouse
- Automation platform
Retail PLM & Product Master for Fashion/Apparel
Run your entire product lifecycle, from styles and SKUs and barcodes to material libraries, BOMs, fit sessions, costing, and versioned tech packs, all from one linked product master every team can see. Automations draft tech packs for new styles, advance approved fits to costing, and send weekly syndication digests and sync-error alerts so nothing stalls between design and storefront.
From a rigid legacy PLM to one product master
Copy the templates
Centralize the product master
Connect the downstream systems
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Product master data, BOM, costing, and tech packs all live as linked records in one base, so teams get the structure of a PLM system with simple interfaces built for non-PLM users, at a fraction of the cost and implementation time.
Every team now edits the same linked product records instead of maintaining parallel spreadsheets, so a change in costing or a material swap is visible everywhere at once instead of requiring a manual re-entry step.
Finished, approved product records sync to the e-commerce platform, so listings draw from the same master data used for costing and tech packs instead of a separate export process.
Removing handoffs between a legacy PLM interface and spreadsheets cut the concept-to-sample cycle from about three weeks to about one week, because design, buying, and supply chain work from the same live record.
Not for the core PLM workflows. The account uses Airtable AI elsewhere for creative and supplier-communication tasks, and the structured product data built here is the foundation those AI workflows draw on.