Retailers and wholesalers today want something simple. They are looking for solutions that make it easier to buy, source and sell their high-quality private label goods. In a typical supply chain, buyers and sellers must access multiple internal and external systems to view data, create transactions, effectively collaborate and keep updated the constantly changing data as it rapidly moves through the global commerce community.

Additionally, as the Fast Fashion phenomenon has driven rising pressure for private label goods and a greater number of collections per calendar year, retailers have to quickly adapt to the increased complexities of lead times and quality issues. The merchant’s role in particular has expanded and morphed from fashion prognosticator to that of margin manager. Rapid response to altering the types of products sourced globally, and changing the store product mix to reflect hot trends and impulse buys, can make profits soar. The key is to introduce smaller SKU lots onto the selling floor to increase sell-through at the initial mark up (IMU) to ensure the merchandise satisfies consumer demand.

So how can retailers and manufacturers take advantage of global sourcing initiatives and still produce more collections in their calendar year in shorter, faster timeframes? The answer is Merchandise Lifecycle Management (MLM).

TradeStone’s MLM suite is the retail industry’s FIRST and ONLY turnkey solution for private label brands. TradeStone’s PLM for Retail, Sourcing, Quality Management and Global Order Management solutions mask the complexities of global trade by normalizing language, time and currency for all users with simple step-by-step wizards for each portion of the transaction. Additionally, TradeStone’s MLM centralizes the buying, sourcing and selling process into one system that everyone can access and update as needed, eliminating the human error associated with manually updating spreadsheets, data entry into multiple databases and keeping up with long email trails with vast amounts of critical information.