Case Study

Charming Shoppes Selects CBX to Plus-Size Its Global Procurement and Logistics Operations

Charming Shoppes is the leading US specialty apparel retailer, with a focus on plus-size women's apparel. Charming Shoppes is also the owner of three retail store brands - Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug and Catherine's Plus Sizes - as well as a direct marketer of women's apparel, Crosstown Traders. With over 2,200 stores, Charming Shoppes is the third-largest specialty retail apparel holding company in the US.

Charming Shoppes' sourcing operations is based in Hong Kong. Charming Shoppes handles approximately 1,000 suppliers and factories across 25 countries in order to manage its merchandising procurement. It is also the connecting point back to the US. headquarters and its two distribution and fulfillment centers.

The Challenge

Charming Shoppes was searching for an integrated supply chain information system to help the company cope with expanding business. Charming Shoppes required a system that could handle the apparel industry's intricately-detailed manufacturing complexities.

In the world of fashion, timing is critical. It is essential that the new system meets the demands that flexible manufacturing and delivery lead times implies. In order for Charming Shoppes to maintain their competitive edge they need to continue responding quickly to changing fashion trends and to quickly replenish merchandise inventory. Additionally, the system must cover the end-to-end sourcing process while providing Charming Shoppes' various offices throughout the globe with instant access to up-to-date information.

The Solution

Charming Shoppes selected CBX Merchant for scaling its global manufacturing operations. With its feature-rich and comprehensive set of functions, Charming Shoppes found CBX Merchant to be an ideal solution to manage its current and future expansion needs.

CBX Merchant's unique central system seamlessly integrates all initial design phase input from its US headquarters and consolidates the data effectively and efficiently for its Asia-Pacific sourcing offices, to carefully monitor and streamline ordering, tracking, assembly and delivery of goods to its retail stores. As an added bonus, CBX Merchant's robustness and flexibility allows Charming Shoppes to manage multiple brands.

CBX Merchant's web-based single window access point feature gives Charming Shoppes' users the ability to collaborate closer than ever before between their sourcing offices and its suppliers. This greatly increases visibility along each stage of the manufacturing process and vastly improves responsiveness in the production process.

To pull it all together, Core Solutions' team of experienced consultants worked closely with Charming Shoppes to implement CBX Merchant through each phase of the project - requirement clarification; infrastructure analysis and design; modeling and system configuration; parallel-run, and production rollout. The project was first successfully rolled out in its Sourcing headquarters in Hong Kong and soon extended to its US headquarters and other sourcing offices across the Asia Pacific region.