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Amanda Rango, Founder and Creative Director of ARD Fashion Consulting, established her full-service design and production consulting firm after two decades in corporate fashion design and product development. Drawing on her extensive experience, Amanda specializes in helping emerging and mid-sized fashion brands launch and scale through tailored services—from initial concept to final product delivery. With PLMBR as a cornerstone of her process, she empowers clients to maintain control and organization over their designs, streamlining production while fostering creativity and efficiency.
Common Challenges Faced by Fashion Brands
In today’s fast-paced fashion industry, efficient workflows are crucial to product success. However, many small to mid-sized fashion brands struggle with process inefficiencies, miscommunication, and time management, leading to costly delays and quality issues.
Below are a few examples of roadblocks that Amanda’s clients have encountered prior to utilizing PLMBR:
Lack of Communication Between Designers and Manufacturers
One of our clients, Chillin Sports Mom, came to ARD Fashion Consulting facing major communication breakdowns with their current manufacturer. They lacked industry-standard tech packs and struggled to communicate creative direction effectively, which led to missed deadlines and costly production errors. Samples consistently fell short of expectations—quality, fit, and construction didn’t align with their vision. After multiple rounds of disappointing samples and no improvement, frustration grew.
ARD Insight : “We often see this gap between design intent and production reality. This is where PLMBR became a game-changer. By implementing detailed, industry-standard tech packs, we enabled real-time communication, clear specifications, and accountability with the manufacturer. The result? Elevated design features, improved quality, clarified process and fewer delays.”
If your samples aren’t coming back as expected, it might be time to evaluate the strength of your tech pack system.
Inefficient methods for creating and managing tech packs
In the fashion industry, inefficient tech pack management can derail an entire product development process. One of the biggest issues we see with our clients is confusion about what information needs to be included in a tech pack, and how to keep that information organized. When critical details are left out or miscommunicated, it can lead to sample errors, production delays, and increased costs.
Common Challenges:
- Not Sure What Information Needs to Be Included: Many brands struggle to identify exactly what manufacturers need to bring their designs to life. Without detailed measurements, material specifications, construction details, and production notes, manufacturers are left to make assumptions—leading to inconsistencies in the final product. Read ARD’s blog post to learn more about what to include in a tech pack.
- Not Sure How to Manage the Product Development Process: Clients often have difficulty tracking the entire process from start to finish. Without a central place to store and update tech packs, it becomes challenging to ensure consistency across different phases of production, such as prototyping, sampling, and final manufacturing. This disorganization leads to miscommunication and wasted time.
How to Overcome These Challenges:
- Provide Complete and Clear Details in the Tech Pack: Ensure your tech packs include all necessary information, such as fabric details, color references, size specifications, and construction guidelines. The more comprehensive your tech pack, the fewer questions your manufacturer will have, reducing the risk of errors.
- Use PLMBR to Centralize and Manage Your Product Development Process: A platform like PLMBR enables brands to manage their entire development process in one place. It allows for real-time updates and collaboration, ensuring everyone—from designers to manufacturers—remains on the same page.
- Set Clear Expectations from the Start: To avoid miscommunication, use your tech pack as a contract. It’s essential to communicate your expectations on quality, fit, and delivery timelines from the beginning. Providing manufacturers with clear, documented instructions helps hold them accountable and ensures you get the desired results on time.
Tech Pack Example with Clear and Concise Sections
Difficulty Scaling Production
Scaling a fashion business presents two major challenges:
1. No Ownership Over Tech Packs
Brands often rely on manufacturers to manage their tech packs, which limits control and increases the risk of miscommunication. This dependence can delay production and lead to costly errors.
Solution: At ARD, we empower clients with custom tech packs they fully own, enabling clear communication with multiple suppliers. This streamlines production, reduces errors, and ensures consistency during scaling.
2. Limited Design Teams, But Need to Expand
Many brands lack in-house design teams but still want to expand their product offerings to stay competitive. These brands want to grow their product lines but don’t have the capacity to interview, hire, and train a full in-house design team.
Solution: ARD Fashion Consulting acts as your external design partner, managing everything from concept to production. With tools like PLMBR, we streamline the design process, allowing brands to expand while focusing on other critical business areas. Instead of the cost and complexity of building a design team, ARD offers expert design services at a fraction of the price.
Using PLMBR as a Seasoned Expert: How ARD Fashion Consulting Integrates PLMBR for Clients
As a super user of PLMBR, Amanda Rango has integrated the platform into ARD’s processes, offering clients a seamless way to:
- Create organized, consistent, and industry-standard tech packs.
- Align teams on product specs, timelines, and approvals in one place.
- Manage feedback efficiently, speeding up the production process.
At ARD, we don’t just consult—we implement. Using advanced tools like PLMBR, we organize complex workflows by providing a centralized platform where every product detail, design change, and specification lives.
This ensures all teams—from designers to manufacturers—work from the same playbook, dramatically reducing errors and revisions. PLMBR, our recent integration, further amplifies this efficiency by providing comprehensive pipeline management across the entire product lifecycle, from concept to distribution.
Client Example: ARD Fashion Consulting x Highlights for Children
In a recent project, ARD Fashion Consulting collaborated with Highlights for Children to not only design a new collection but also update the fit of their core t-shirt design for 34 different sizes.
Using PLMBR for Highlights for Children allowed the design, production, and marketing teams to collaborate in real time, significantly reducing communication gaps and ensuring that product specifications were always up-to-date.
Working closely with Priority Designs for this case study, the team integrated CLO3D digital Avatar renderings into the tech packs to visualize the garment on each size group.
Once we conducted virtual fit sessions, ARD created a graded measurement chart within PLMBR to move into production and also quickly generate base sizes for future garment development.
With 5 different people involved in this project at any given time, PLMBR solved many common pain points that tend to emerge as product teams grow.
- Centralized Information: Tech packs are stored in one easily accessible place, ensuring that all stakeholders—whether internal or external—have the right information at the right time.
- Clear, Visual Communication: Visual annotations and real-time updates in PLMBR prevent miscommunication between teams, ensuring that everyone from designers to factory workers is aligned.
- Version Control and Iteration Management: Changes and iterations are managed effortlessly, so there’s no more guessing which version of a design is current.
- Design Tool Integration: PLMBR integrates with design tools like Adobe Illustrator, ensuring a smooth transition from concept to production.
This project demonstrated the wide scope of abilities for collaboration within PLMBR. Freelance designers and mid-sized companies alike are no longer limited to the confines of Adobe Illustrator and email.
Collaboration and Feedback - How PLMBR Evolved Through Professional Input
At ARD Fashion Consulting, we view collaboration as a powerful tool for driving innovation. Our partnership with PLMBR exemplifies this, as both teams continually work together to enhance the platform's capabilities. Through shared feedback and insights from real-world challenges, we’ve helped shape the evolution of PLMBR, ensuring that it serves the diverse needs of fashion professionals with efficiency and precision.
Our clients’ needs have always guided us, and our collective feedback has been instrumental in developing features that improve communication, streamline workflows, and create more reliable outcomes for design and production teams.
Feature #1: Line sheets
In 2023, PLMBR rolled out its line sheet reporting feature, which was co-developed with input from industry professionals, including the ARD team. This feature simplifies tracking seasonal collections and facilitates smooth communication between internal teams and external partners. By implementing line sheets, PLMBR has provided brands a valuable tool for ensuring consistency and clarity across all stages of the development process, something both ARD and PLMBR recognized as a priority.
Feature #2: Shortcuts
Another example of our collaborative feedback was the development of shortcuts for frequent data entries such as color codes and recurring items. This feature arose from shared conversations about how to make tech packs more efficient and eliminate unnecessary manual input. By working closely with PLMBR, ARD helped introduce a command key system to streamline processes like BOM (Bill of Materials) entry. The result was an improved workflow that saves time while maintaining accuracy—a win for both of our teams and the clients we serve.
Feature #3 (Coming Soon): Product Code ID Generator
Looking ahead, PLMBR continues to innovate with input from its users, including the ARD team. One of the upcoming features, the Product Code ID Generator, was developed in response to designers’ needs for automated style number generation. By allowing users to pre-set their preferred formats, this tool will bring efficiency and consistency to tech pack creation, improving workflow for fashion professionals. We’re excited to see how this feature, developed through shared input, will further benefit the community.
Conclusion: The Future of Fashion Development
At ARD Fashion Consulting, we’re proud to play a role in PLMBR’s evolution, using the platform to deliver streamlined solutions to our clients while contributing valuable insights for continuous improvement. This collaborative partnership empowers fashion brands to elevate their processes, improve communication, and scale efficiently—all while maintaining top-notch product quality. Together, ARD and PLMBR are shaping the future of fashion development, ensuring brands can confidently grow and succeed.
Ready to take your brand to the next level? Are inefficiencies holding back your brand? Let ARD Fashion Consulting and PLMBR help you take control of your workflow. Schedule a consultation today, or explore a PLMBR demo to see the system in action.