Bamboo Rose Doubles Down on Designer Empowerment with Backbone PLM Acquisition

Combination of Bamboo Rose and Backbone PLM catapults creativity and boosts productivity with design and sourcing technology that helps retailers get products to market fast. 

BOSTON, March 23, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Bamboo Rose, the leading collaborative product development, sourcing & supply chain platform for retailers and consumer brands announced today its acquisition of Backbone PLM of Boulder, Colorado.

Backbone provides a designer-centric product development platform that empowers retailers and brands of all sizes across apparel, soft goods, and hard goods to make products smarter, faster, and at scale. The digitization of historically manual parts of the design production cycle within the Backbone application leaves designers time to do what they do best: create, innovate, and develop products that align with their brands and business models.

Backbone's cloud-based system of interconnected libraries helps clients win back the 20% time loss experienced in the production activities of searching for product information.

The combined company, which manages over $1.2T of transactions a year for thousands of products and users across hundreds of leading brands, will provide best-in-class end-to-end PLM for creative and technical workstreams. The collective platform solves critical business challenges for general merchandise, apparel & specialty, food & pharmacy, and other retailers. 

"Truly serving the myriad of needs for product design and development at enterprise scale is challenging stuff," said Matt Stevens, CEO of Bamboo Rose. "Empowering retailers and brands to accelerate their digital journey while not impacting the creativity and agility that makes them great in the eyes of their clients in the first place requires deep real-world knowledge by the many practitioners involved. Backbone's proven success of enabling the designer's impact to that journey without sacrificing design at the altar of business process improvement will be a force multiplier when combined with Bamboo Rose's existing market-dominating supplier collaboration and technical design efficiency gains."

"As someone who's had the pleasure of working with both Bamboo Rose and Backbone PLM, I was beyond excited to learn that these two leading retail technology companies are coming together as one. A seamless, integrated digital design and sourcing journey – one harmonious system bringing the best each company has to offer would be a game changer in the industry," said Mario Ramirez, VP of Supply Chain at Chubbies. "I've seen firsthand how this integration transforms the concept-to-launch journey and brings products to market faster and more efficiently. It's a powerful combination. The future is bright for Bamboo Rose and Backbone, and I can't wait to see what they'll achieve together."

"The Bamboo Rose team is on a mission to tame the concept-to-launch PLM workflow. Backbone PLM fits really well into that model, delivering solutions for front-end design that complement the strengths of Bamboo Rose. Together we will offer the most comprehensive PLM solution in the market," said Jeff Fedor, CEO of Backbone PLM. "We are excited to join the talent and technology of our collective organization."

Jeff Fedor will join Bamboo Rose's executive leadership team as SVP of Product after the transition.

Lincoln International served as financial advisor to Bamboo Rose in its acquisition of Backbone.

To learn more about the acquisition, please visit the Bamboo Rose news page, or meet with our industry representatives at Shoptalk.

March 26-29, the Bamboo Rose team will attend Shoptalk. Join us, along with thousands of retail changemakers, to discuss the future of our industry, schedule a time to meet the Bamboo Rose team in Las Vegas.

ABOUT BAMBOO ROSE

Bamboo Rose is the leading collaborative product development, sourcing & supply chain platform for retailers and consumer brands; helping companies bring great products to market faster, more efficiently, and at higher margins. The platform features a suite of patented supply chain solutions, including Bamboo Rose B2B Marketplace, product lifecycle management, sourcing, purchase order management, global trade management, and financing, each one supported by intelligent engines for optimization, costing, and scheduling across the platform. https://www.bamboorose.com/

Backbone PLM

Backbone PLM is a product development platform that enables brands to make products smarter, faster, and at scale. The company's PLM software is used by some of the most innovative names in the fashion and apparel industry, ushering products from conception to development through a collaborative, cloud-based environment for design and production teams. Backbone helps brands innovate, design, and develop products at digital speed by providing tools that empower creativity, decrease time to market, and drive revenue. https://backboneplm.com/