Brandboom's Software Targeted to Help Showroom Owners

Timing is everything in the world of fashion, where speed-to-market is ramping up and on-time delivery is paramount.

That’s where Black Closet Inc. comes in. The Los Angeles technology company has a software program called Brandboom, which is meant to make sales-order management technology more user-friendly for showrooms and manufacturers, said Amy Zhou, the company’s director of marketing.

In April, Black Closet changed the name of its self-named software to Brandboom. It also debuted more online tutorials on its website.

“[Showrooms] will still do what they do—build relationships,” Zhou said. “We make it 10 times easier to do that.”

On Brandboom, showrooms create profiles on the software’s platform, where buyers can view line sheets. Showroom owners can also use PDF files to create and send line sheets to their clients, allowing them to place orders. Brandboom also notifies showrooms every time their page is viewed or an order is placed. In addition, showroom owners can control who sees and doesn’t see their company profile.

Other Brandboom features include translating a website from English to other languages, making pie charts and providing a photography service to make line sheets. The software can be used on mobile devices such as an iPad.

The program saves showroom owners time with its tools for developing online line sheets. It also helps clear the clutter of paper orders and the occasional confusion of sending orders through emails, which might get lost, Zhou explained.

The software saved time and labor for New York–headquartered The Foundation showroom, which, in June, opened a Los Angeles office. Previously, the showroom staff made its own line sheets, but picture quality often was not good and viewers could not zoom in on pictures and check garments from multiple angles, said Dre Hayes, The Foundation’s co-founder.

In 2008, the showroom started using Brandboom. “It gives us a lot of control over sales materials,” Hayes said.

The Brandboom system is intended to be as user-friendly as creating a Facebook profile. The technology company has more than 200 clients, including apparel companies such as Diesel, Penguin and AG Adriano Goldschmied.

Black Closet was founded by Eric Ni and Ken Leung in 2008, the year they graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Irvine, respectively. Along with its Los Angeles headquarters, Black Closet also maintains a sales office and a studio in New York City.

The market for sales-order management software is becoming more sophisticated and crowded. Companies such as Threadvine of Bainbridge Island, Wash.; Hubsoft in Orange County, Calif.; and Visuality of New York compete with Black Closet.

The next step for many of these companies will be integrating their systems with enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs, said David Dea, an instructor at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles as well as a former business-development executive with Nouvolution, a publisher of ERP software. Hubsoft is testing an ERP-integration program with Nouvolution, Dea said.

Black Closet has customized its program for some of its clients to work with ERP programs, Zhou said.

Software companies still have a long way to go to convince the entire market of showroom owners and managers that investing in their software is a good idea. Many showrooms create line sheets with Adobe Photoshop and share them through various cloud-computing services, said Liza Stewart, owner of the Liza Stewart Inc. showroom in the California Market Center in Los Angeles.

However, she said creating a service or software program for line sheets remains a compelling offer. “You present a collection on an iPad or a laptop to create interest. An image is worth a thousand words,” she said.—Andrew Asch