Housewares leader gains visibility into product development, eliminates bottlenecks and accelerates item set-up

CAMPBELL, Calif., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Centric Software^® is delighted to announce the release of a success story about its customer, Zak! Designs, an innovative leader in licensed and branded consumer housewares. Centric Software delivers innovative, integrated, end-to-end AI-powered enterprise solutions to take products from concept to commercialization. Fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home, cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail teams can plan, design, develop, source, comply, buy, make, price, allocate, assort, sell and replenish products to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Headquartered in Washington state, USA, Zak! Designs is an international corporation that creates licensed hardgoods such as drinkware and tableware featuring global entertainment brands. Products are sold through major brick-and-mortar retailers and online stores.

As the business expanded and licensed product programs grew in complexity, Zak! Designs sought to modernize product development, establish one repository for product data and scale efficiently, while not adding any new headcount.

"Without a formal system or single source of truth for product development, answering any kind of question was difficult… everything was always a surprise," recalls Raymond Shill, Vice President of IT at Zak! Designs. The company wanted to standardize licensing approval processes and gain real visibility into blockers across projects.

With Centric PLM™, Zak! Designs has integrated Centric PLM to ERP, moved from scattered tools to a holistic, real-time view of projects and blockers, eliminated an inefficient item-numbering system (saving roughly a person-and-a-half of workload over a year), cutting item setup time by over 99% to under one minute —all while enabling 200% revenue growth without adding product development headcount.

In addition, the items that were previously listed as whole SKUs, are now broken out into full BOMs with detailed component data—adding no new staff to accomplish this large advance in granularity. "With Centric PLM, we now have a path for continuous improvement as we grow," says Shill. "So far, that's exactly what we're seeing."

"As Zak! Designs scales with global retailers and licensors, Centric PLM gives the agility and control that was previously lacking," says Fabrice Canonge, CEO of Centric Software. "Complex workflows are digitalized and standardized to be able to respond faster to opportunities from retail partners—without proportionally increasing headcount."

Read the full story to learn more about Zak! Designs' journey and the unexpected event that reinforced the decision to unify product development under the Centric PLM umbrella.

READ THE FULL STORY

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Zak! Designs (zak.com)

Zak Designs was founded in 1976 and is headquartered in Washington state, USA. It began by aiming to garner smiles from children and nostalgia from adults with beloved characters on stylish, fun and functional tableware and drinkware. A growth-minded housewares leader, the company is best known for its bold, colorful designs and extensive portfolio of licensed products tied to some of the world's most recognizable entertainment brands. Zak Designs serves a wide audience through major retailers, grocery chains, specialty stores and online channels. The business has grown over the decades into a global operation, with a strong focus on large retail programs for customers such as Walmart, Target and Amazon.

Centric Software® (www.centricsoftware.com)

From its headquarters in Silicon Valley, Centric Software provides an innovative and AI-enabled product concept-to-commercialization platform for retailers, brands and manufacturers of all sizes. As experts in fashion, luxury, footwear, outdoor, home, cosmetics & personal care as well as multi-category retail, Centric Software delivers best-of-breed solutions to plan, design, develop, source, comply, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish products.

• Centric PLM™, the leading PLM solution for fashion, outdoor, footwear and private label, optimizes product execution from ideation to development, sourcing and manufacture, realizing up to 50% improvement in productivity and a 60% decrease in time to market.
• Centric Planning & Pricing™, a cloud-native solution powered by Centric AI that unifies planning, pricing and inventory optimization, enabling retailers and brands to increase sell-through, improve margins and optimize inventory efficiency from pre-season through in-season execution.
• Centric Market Intelligence™ is an AI-driven platform delivering insights into consumer trends, competitor offers and pricing to boost competitively and get closer to the consumer, driving up to a 12% increase in average initial price point.
• Centric Visual Boards™ pivot actionable data in a visual-first orientation to ensure robust, consumer-right assortments and product offers, dramatically decreasing assortment development cycle time.
• Centric PXM™, AI-powered product experience management (PXM) encompasses PIM, DAM, content syndication and digital shelf analytics (DSA) to optimize the product commercialization lifecycle resulting in a transformed brand experience. Increase sales channels, boost sell through and drive margins.

Centric Software's market-driven solutions have the highest user adoption rate, customer satisfaction rate and fastest time to value in the industry. Centric Software has received multiple industry awards and recognition, appearing regularly in world-leading analyst reports and research.

Centric Software is a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes (Euronext Paris: FR0014003TT8, DSY.PA), the world leader in 3D design software, 3D digital mock-up and PLM solutions.

Centric Software is a registered trademark of Centric Software, Inc. in the US and other countries. Centric PLM, Centric Planning & Pricing, Centric Market Intelligence, Centric Visual Boards, Centric PXM, Centric PIM, Centric DAM, Centric Shoppingfeed® and Centric DSA (including Centric Digital Shelf Analytics) are trademarks of Centric Software, Inc. All third-party trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.

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SOURCE Centric Software