Bamboo Rose acquired Backbone PLM to broaden its product development, sourcing and supply chain platform with new product lifecycle management capabilities.
Boston-based Bamboo Rose, whose clients include American Eagle and Belk, has purchased the Boulder, Colo.-based Backbone, which digitizes manual parts of the product development process for apparel, soft goods and hard goods.
Backbone says it can cut product creation time by 20 percent by leveraging a cloud-based system of interconnected libraries to organize and simplify access to product information. Teams use the software to create visual product reports and compile data for greater visibility as they collaborate with internal and external partners, summarizing and reviewing products by season, collection, type, and more. Last spring, the company launched Backbone Lite, a version designed for emerging direct-to-consumer fashion brands. Available in the Shopify app store, Backbone said the platform reduces manual data entry by 40 percent, allowing design teams to share up-to-date product details in real time.
Bamboo Rose and Backbone PLM say they collectively manage $1.2 trillion in annual transactions for thousands of products and users at hundreds of brands. Their combined capabilities offer a comprehensive, end-to-end product lifecycle management tool for both creative and technical workstreams across general merchandise, apparel, food, pharmacy and other types of retail.
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“Truly serving the myriad of needs for product design and development at enterprise scale is challenging stuff,” said Matt Stevens, Bamboo Rose CEO. “Empowering retailers and brands to accelerate their digital journey while not impacting the creativity and agility that makes them great in the eyes of their clients in the first place requires deep real-world knowledge by the many practitioners involved.”
Stevens pointed to how Backbone PLM helps designers work smarter and faster without “sacrificing design at the altar of business process improvement.” That capability “will be a force multiplier when combined with Bamboo Rose’s existing market-dominating supplier collaboration and technical design efficiency gains,” he added.
“The Bamboo Rose team is on a mission to tame the concept-to-launch PLM workflow,” and the PLM platform can augment uts model, providing solutions for front-end design that complement existing capacities, said Backbone CEO Jeff Fedor, who will join Bamboo Rose’s executive leadership team as senior vice president of product.
Men’s lifestyle brand Chubbies, a client of both Bamboo Rose and Backbone, will benefit from “one harmonious system” for digital design and sourcing, according to vice president of supply chain Mario Ramirez. “I’ve seen firsthand how this integration transforms the concept-to-launch journey and brings products to market faster and more efficiently,” he said. “It’s a powerful combination.”