Blog | Backbone App
Backbone’s Feature Forward Product Development Platform
By: Team Backbone | Dec. 21st, 2021
At a Glance:
The year is winding down, but product development continues to ramp up as the industry inches closer to Chinese New Year. The team at Backbone helps fashion and apparel brands remain versatile during this time of year, working diligently to optimize our user interface and improve functionality for all users. Follow along as we highlight Backbone’s dynamic product features, including Item Views and Bulk Add Colorways.
The Versatile Item View
The Item Views feature within Backbone puts product-associated data at your fingertips in real-time, committing to a spreadsheet-like experience with a consistent search and sort function that displays data such as lead times, sample tracking, factory allocation, and much more. Designers and developers save time creating and editing Views, benefiting from a streamlined workflow that allows them to work faster. Product developers have access to flexible data that can be viewed, sorted, and customized in any way possible. Choose to bulk upload, search by the supplier name, or add variants like color, season, or MOQ, and drill down to specific attributes of each component. Filter product-associated data, including lead times, sample tracking, factory allocation, and much more to enable data-backed decisions and drive product revenue.
The Item Views feature ensures all flexible data is well consolidated. Updates can be viewed by team members in real-time, and material lists will automatically link to any BOMs that reference specific components. Backbone’s reporting tools roll out component-level attributes into the Item View in an easy-to-read format that requires no tedious copying or pasting, simplifying how brands keep track of lead times, approvals, and supplier reference numbers.
Custom fields can be input into the Item Views to help improve functionality while teams manage variable subsets of BOM-level data to gain a better understanding of how components are used on each product. These insights provide visibility to where your products stand in the ordering process, helping to forecast costs and save money throughout the development process.
Peter Millar, a luxury performance sportswear brand, found success using Item Views, as this feature allowed design and development teams to share product information across departments while leveraging filters to build unique reports for different projects and analytical needs. Peter Millar was looking for an image-friendly, intuitive system to input samples, share visuals, and collaborate on style promotions, and Backbone’s Item Views replaced its server-based system to provide an organized, digital view of all product data and improve communication across business modules.
Backbone’s Item Views helped modernize Peter Millar’s production process, consolidating information into one centralized system and making it more effective for teams to collaborate with vendors at each development stage. Samples were reduced and company leaders gained access to historical product data that enabled more accurate forecasting for future seasons.
Download the case study — Backbone Helps Align Peter Millar’s Collaboration Efforts
What to Look For?
Product developers and production teams will utilize Item Views the most; due to the convenience of the streamlined reporting creation process, improved table legibility, and quick path to edit column headers.
1. Table Density Layout: Experience a better search and sort function with your choice of wide or condensed columns
2. Display options: Leverage the drag-to-copy feature, column moving, row sorting, and undo/redo.
3. Cleaner user interface: The tabular design and Add View button allow developers to switch from Product to Component Views with ease
4. New filter options: Filter by additional built-in fields: created date, last modified date, creator, etc.
5. Smarter workflows: Create and edit Views in fewer clicks, leaving more time to design and develop
Bulk Add Colorways
Tired of adding colors one by one when creating products and components? We have a solution! Backbone’s Bulk Add Colorways feature allows designers to add multiple color swatches to products and components in just a few clicks. Manually uploading one at a time is far too time-consuming and increases the chance of submitting duplicate swatches, whereas a bulk upload allows more time to design and develop new products with unlimited creative freedom.
Designers have the option to enter specific queries and navigate through different palettes to find or select your desired swatch. This process reduces the repetitive nature of adding component colorways by hand and vastly improves color variant creation.
Chubbies is a brand that benefits from this feature tremendously. If you aren’t familiar with Chubbies, they are a clothing manufacturer specializing in men’s shorts and swim trunks — popularizing the retro short-short look for consumers of all shapes and sizes. Besides rejecting the conformity of traditional pants, part of the brand’s trademark look is the myriad of color varieties.
For example, Chubbies’ classic 5-inch inseam swim trunk has up to thirty colorways per season, and its Summer 2021 collection featured 476 SKUs. For a fashion brand with so many SKUs, uploading swatches one by one would be an incredibly painstaking process. With Bulk Add Colorways, Chubbies can efficiently manage these styles to keep the development cycle on track and get products to market faster.
Before Backbone, Chubbies manually uploaded as many product assortments as possible, leaving the door open for costly inaccuracies. Backbone simplified this process and reduced the margin of error without outsourcing additional developers. Essentially, Backbone allows Chubbies team members to do their jobs efficiently, free to create new products without restriction.
Download the case study — Chubbies & Backbone: The Perfect Pair
What to Look For?
1. Increased speed: Adding multiple colors at once offers a much quicker experience when creating products or components
2. Decreased clicks: Experience significantly fewer clicks per color-ad — no longer needing to save every time you add a color swatch
3. Prevent duplication: Universal search is available when adding colorways, preventing the duplication of swatches
See What Else is New
We look forward to improving your Backbone experience, so keep an eye out for the latest product features each month.
And as always, keep the feedback coming! If you have questions or would like additional information, our Customer Success team would love to hear from you!
Interested in learning more on what Backbone can do for your brand?
Schedule a demo with a member of our team below!