Jaanuu Scrubs Up Data Management and Cross-Team Collaboration with Centric PLM

“When new team members came on board in 2022, it really was the land of Excel, and it wasn’t manageable. It was difficult for us to know the history of Jaanuu when everything was in folders and shared drives. We needed a centralized location for data.”

Stephanie Jane Scott, SVP Creative Director at Jaanuu, explains that the premium scrubs brand had reached a point in their evolution where they urgently needed to improve communication and collaboration between design, tech design and product development teams in order to expand their collections efficiently and keep timelines on track.

Since implementing Centric PLM™ in 2022, Jaanuu has developed a centralized platform for product data and communications, streamlined tech pack and BOM creations, using templates and libraries and built accountability and traceability into every step of the product development and design process. Here’s how they did it!

Stylish, practical and physician-founded

Co-founded in 2013 by Dr. Neela Sethi Young, a pediatrician, and her brother, Shaan Sethi, a former private equity investor, Jaanuu sells premium scrubs, scrub jackets and underscrubs for medical professionals. Jaanuu is based in California and primarily retails direct-to-consumer through their e-commerce site to the North American market. Jaanuu expanded into wholesale sales in 2023, and also has a B2B business.

The medical scrubs market has become highly competitive since the pandemic, but Jaanuu was ahead of the curve with their disruptive approach to creating stylish yet high-performance scrubs that are the opposite of a commodity product. Jaanuu builds on insider healthcare knowledge, working closely with their healthcare customers to offer medical apparel that combines practicality, comfort, premium quality, next-generation fabric technology and on-trend style.

Rapid growth and centralization

Jaanuu has grown rapidly and went through a significant period of change in 2022 with the injection of venture capital funding and the addition of many new team members. At that point, it became clear that the brand needed to digitalize and centralize their product design and development processes to grow. Jaanuu had been working with a combination of spreadsheets, emails and cloud storage, but decided to replace these with a PLM solution.

“We are a seasonless business, because our apparel is worn mainly in temperature controlled and regulated environments,” explains Scott. “But we still have to work on an 18-month calendar and plan out quarterly collections, because our products are manufactured overseas and shipped on a traditional apparel calendar schedule. We have to be style relevant and ensure that we follow runway trends, particularly color trends. Our design, tech design and product development teams need the right tools to stay on schedule and keep creating great products.”

Scott continues, “Our new team members were coming from different backgrounds, some of them from very large businesses, and expected to have a centralized platform to access product histories and collaborate with other teams and overseas vendors.”

Ease of use and integration

Key decision-makers at Jaanuu were already familiar with the benefits of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. Centric was in the mix of options from the start, as several team members had used Centric PLM at other companies. Centric’s usability, ease of integration with other solutions and ‘single source of truth’ functionality tipped the balance for Jaanuu.

“Centric is a leading PLM solution, especially in terms of the interface and how user-friendly it is,” says Scott. “The design team like things to be pretty and they enjoy using it. Our tech design team are CLO 3D users, and Centric can connect directly with CAD tools such as CLO 3D to streamline design. We also intend to integrate Centric PLM with other enterprise solutions, such as our ERP system, down the line. Ease of integration was a really important consideration.

Vast improvement in communication

Jaanuu implemented Centric PLM in just six months, coming in on time and on budget. Design, tech design and product development teams now use Centric PLM on a daily basis, and cite time savings and data tracking as major benefits. Spreadsheets have been reduced by over 40% as Jaanuu transfers more functions into PLM.

“Bringing people up to speed took a little time, but everyone got it pretty quickly and the Centric team were always on hand with assistance when we needed it,” Scott says.

“In terms of communicating cross-functionally and externally, it’s a vast improvement from where we used to be. Having a centralized location for all product-related information means that tasks such as updating sketches and creating data sheets are much more efficient now. Creating and sending out tech packs is streamlined and centralized. We save about 50% of the time we usually spend creating BOMs since we carry forward and reuse templates instead of starting from scratch for each style.”

“It’s easy to navigate,” she continues. “Every style now has a home in the system and an archive of that style, showing the history of its development. Anyone can dip into the system and pick up where someone else left off, which is very useful when a team member is out, for instance. Previously, product data might have been locked away on their computer.”

Centric PLM has also improved accountability and visibility at Jaanuu, says Scott.

“It has definitely helped us with accountability and knowing where things are, who owns what and what stage it is at. That makes the business much more secure, as we are able to see what needs to be done instantly and information is not lost when someone leaves.”

Staying sharp in a competitive market

As the scrubs market gets more competitive, Jaanuu is making plans to expand distribution while maintaining their position as a style-conscious, high-quality scrubs brand.

“We have to make sure that we stay sharp and remain a disruptor in this space, as we always have been,” says Scott. “We are ramping up direct-to-consumer, but also expanding our wholesale lane, and the future for us is definitely international. Integrating PLM with our e-commerce and ERP systems will be important, so I’m glad that we got ahead of that and preemptively formalized the processes on the design and product development side.”

“To expand, we have to ensure that we have robust digital systems that can speak to other systems. As long as we stay grounded in healthcare as a brand and understand what the customer needs, we’ll continue to grow. And as we grow and teams change, now there’s a centralized location for product data where we can onboard people quickly and easily. We’ve implemented a solution that makes us more of a modern apparel brand, and I think it will be beneficial to the future of Jaanuu.”

More about Jaanuu

Founded in 2013, Jaanuu is a premium medical scrubs brand based in California. Jaanuu has grown rapidly, primarily through DTC sales in the North American market, and has recently expanded into wholesale.