Browzwear scales with Salesforce to make fashion more sustainable

Browzwear has been at the forefront of digitising the global fashion industry for more than twenty years. The company made its start with the launch of a virtual fitting room and now offers innovative 3D technologies that help fashion companies digitise their design processes and do away with physical samples. Results include a significant reduction in waste and faster time to market for new collections.

Behind the growth and success of Browzwear is a team of 225 employees across seven countries. Salesforce aligns these employees around a single view of the customer and automates workflow so the company can scale more efficiently.

From early on in her fashion career, Lim has been concerned about the industry’s waste and pollution and wanted to be involved in affecting real change. It was her passion for sustainability that led Lim to join Browzwear’s co-founders in digitising the industry with technologies like its Fabric Analyser and VStitcher. With these technologies, designers can create true-to-life 3D simulations that demonstrate how a chosen fabric bends and stretches.

Lim shared that the accuracy of the simulations means they can be used instead of samples to facilitate design decisions and approvals.

“The simulations reduce the number of samples produced and shipped across the world and take months off the design process,” said Lim.

Browzwear adopted Salesforce early on to streamline its own workflow and help as many customers as possible realise the benefits of digitisation.

Prior to adopting Salesforce, Browzwear struggled with transparency. While the company comprised just six people at the time, they often travelled and worked onsite with customers. They needed a solution to capture information, have it available on the go, and share it with colleagues.

Lim explained that Salesforce was a natural fit as it provided a platform on which the company could grow and build out its customer journey.

“Being in the business of transformation, we knew we needed to pick the right solution or we would need to make big changes later on. That’s why we chose Salesforce. We felt that it was a company that would keep growing and support us for the long-term,” said Lim.

Browzwear was right. The use of Salesforce has helped the company scale from a team of six to 225 and solved the challenge of transparency.

“We can see what’s happening with each customer at any point in time which is especially important when we are working with a customer in multiple locations,” said Lim. “Leaders also have real-time information about their teams’ activities, including some amazing dashboards that help them to monitor sales and drive performance more effectively.”

Salesforce interoperability with other business systems builds on the transparency provided. For example, Salesforce integration with Browzwear’s customer service solution makes it easy for account executives to stay across any support requests from customers.

In addition to consolidating data about sales and customer accounts, Salesforce Sales Cloud has automated and streamlined workflow. For example, booking and invoicing of each order can now be completed by a customer’s account executive as opposed to being handled by three different team members.

The account executive simply completes the order in Salesforce and it is automatically sent to the customer for their e-signature via DocuSign from the Salesforce AppExchange.

Once signed, the order flows back into Salesforce and Browzwear’s finance system and an invoice is generated automatically.

“Salesforce has helped us to automate and streamline our processes, making everything highly efficient,” said Lim. “We are now looking at how we can further optimise the customer journey and that includes reducing the time between their first contact to when we send through a proposal.”

"Salesforce also helps everyone to plan and monitor their activities with tools like calendars, dashboards, and reports," said Irene Lua, Business System Analyst at Browzwear. "It also helps us to manage leads and follow through with each opportunity until we close the deal."

Browzwear uses Tableau to track and understand its revenue operations, including sales and other financial metrics. The dashboards make it easy for management and sales teams to explore their own data and extract granular insights to inform decisions.

Lim shared that the company has been building out its data capabilities and now has a data analytics team who have helped make data self-serve.

“We have reached the point where we have data at our fingertips to drive decisions. Tableau has helped to provide that autonomy and allows teams to slice and dice their data in multiple ways to understand their results,” said Lim.

Another benefit is that there’s just one single source of truth, so everyone can collaborate and make decisions based on the same set of data. This has reduced the time spent verifying numbers and data due to previous discrepancies in reporting.

In addition, everyone can view the latest data at any time, from anywhere rather than calling different team members to pull reports. This not only saves time but means that customer questions can be answered straight away.

The data transparency and efficiencies provided by Salesforce have helped to propel Browzwear’s growth. The company has supported more than 1,000 fashion companies to accelerate their digital transformation, resulting in measurable improvements in sustainability and efficiency. For example, there are approximately 500,000 fewer garment samples created each month across Browzwear’s customer base. And when it comes to efficiency, Browzwear has helped customers to reduce the number of meetings required for production approval by as much as 50%.

To expand the adoption and impact of 3D design, Browzwear has launched an Indie Program that allows independent designers and pattern makers around the world to access its technology and promote their portfolios through Browzwear’s Professional Guild.

Browzwear has also launched an online university to help designers learn new 3D design skills for free. Nearly 5,000 people have signed up to date and course completion rates are as high as 60%.

“The university has propelled understanding of digital product creation and helped people to re-skill. We are now seeing those who attended create and share their portfolios on our Professional Guild and that’s led to new jobs,” said Lim.

What’s most exciting, is the momentum that’s been built around 3D design and a more sustainable way of working.

“We’re experiencing healthy growth. We exceeded our targets in the first half of the year and are now at sixty percent year-on-year growth. What’s really great though is that means more people are signing on to this way of designing and selling. We are proud to partner with customers to make that change and of the impact it has on sustainability,” said Lim.