15 April, 2024

Maria Black to Elevate Compliance with Centric PLM

Danish jewelry brand partners with Centric Software to prioritize traceability, compliance and automation

CAMPBELL, Calif., April 16, 2024 – Centric Software®, the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) market leader, proudly announces its partnership with Maria Black, a contemporary fine and fashion jewelry brand based in Copenhagen.

Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Maria Black founded her eponymous jewelry brand in 2010 and creates contemporary jewelry collections that are driven by an inclusive ethos, inviting customers to explore and embrace their individuality in fresh and creative ways. The company has grown quickly from humble beginnings, producing and retailing at some of London’s most renowned markets, including Portobello Road Market and Sunday Upmarket, to a company with 30 employees, eight brick-and-mortar stores worldwide and robust e-commerce and wholesale distribution channels.

“We have a lot of new developments, and therefore a lot of information to organize in one central location,” says Maria Black, Founder and Creative Director at Maria Black.

The combination of stringent compliance, for example for IMPACT gold which is 30% Fairtrade & 70% recycled gold, and sustainability regulations, an increased amount of data to consolidate and an over-reliance on spreadsheets and manual administration led the team to adopt a PLM system.

“So much information is siloed and there’s huge potential for mishaps working across countless documents and communication channels. We’d sometimes receive a file from our wholesalers with 150 values to fill out,” shares Black. “We were desperate to find one single source of truth in a PLM and a way to reduce time-consuming tasks as well as ensure proper traceability and sustainability documentation.”

The advent of new environmental legislation and the growing prominence of Digital Product Passports (DPP) led Maria Black to explore PLM as a means of enhancing their supply chain visibility and gathering accurate data surrounding their product materials, sourcing and packaging.

“What really pushed us on the decision to implement a PLM system was compliance,” says Black. “There was an increasing need for traceability and insight into the specific materials that we use and put out into the world.”

The Maria Black team assessed several different PLM systems over the course of a few years and selected Centric PLM™, in large part due to Centric’s industry expertise and valuable technical features including the Costing and PO modules.

“Centric PLM seems quite simple to integrate,” says Black. “Our main partner based in India that does 90% of our production recently implemented Centric PLM. It seems like there is great potential and alignment with producers.”

Maria Black plans to utilize PLM to streamline product development as well as using the solution to automate data entry into their e-commerce system. And for course, it will also be used for traceability and compliance information and documentation.

“We expect teams will save a huge amount of time by cutting out manual data entry and be freed up to focus on sales and development activities,” explains Black. “We look forward to streamlining the organization, having one single source of truth and substantially reducing product development time.”

“We are delighted that Maria Black has selected Centric Software as a partner to navigate the increasingly complex compliance and traceability landscape,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “We look forward to seeing how Centric PLM will modernize Maria Black’s processes and support their future growth.”

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Maria Black (https://www.maria-black.com/se/) Maria Black founded her eponymous jewellery brand in 2010. Since then, the Copenhagen-born, Danish-Irish designer has created contemporary fine and fashion jewellery collections that are driven by the brand’s inclusive ethos, and which invite individuals to explore and embrace their individuality in fresh and creative ways. Today, Maria Black is run from Copenhagen by our team of dedicated individuals who uphold the brand’s founding belief that personal style and fashion are not for us to dictate, but for you to explore. We are passionate about bringing you the pieces that let your creativity run free. Using a combination of traditional craftsmanship and modern techniques, the sculptural shapes of our precious metal designs are inspired by sources as diverse as everyday objects, people, subcultures and life moments.