How Centra’s PIM eliminates product data pains

For fashion brands, product information management is a different beast: dozens of SKUs per style, seasonal updates, and rotating collections for multiple markets. That’s exactly why a generic PIM often falls short. Centra’s API-first, fashion-native PIM is built to handle the complexities that are specific to fashion ecommerce—ensuring accuracy, consistency, and speed across all digital channels.

In this article, we’ll break down Centra’s PIM capabilities and why they matter for fashion brands.

From chaos to control: leveraging PIM to scale fashion ecommerce

Technically, fashion brands can run an online store without product information management software but it’s far from easy. Many start out with spreadsheets, shared folders, and manual updates across multiple sales channels. As soon as product ranges expand, collections drop more often, or new markets launch, this approach quickly becomes unmanageable.

A PIM organizes every layer of product data: variants and sizes (and how they relate), product descriptions in multiple languages, localized size charts, categories, collections, and seasonal drops. Without it, manually updating product data eats up time, errors are created, and the customer experience suffers.

Brands have plenty of reasons to invest in product information management software—but the biggest one is growth. A good PIM doesn’t just patch gaps in your ecommerce setup. It supports the bigger picture: streamlining operations, reducing costly errors, and delivering a consistent, high-quality brand experience across your digital flagship.

Centra’s PIM: built for the way fashion works

Most ecommerce platforms use generic “options” to handle product data. But Centra is different. It is purpose-built for fashion, making it easier to manage complex assortments, launch faster, and sell smarter across every channel.

Fashion product logic out of the box

Centra is specifically designed to support the logic of complex fashion products. The PIM understands all the different dimensions such as styles, colors, and sizes of clothes and accessories and maps this information in a meaningful way to pricing, campaigns and stock data. Bringing these features together across the platform allows for more customization and detail than most ecommerce solutions.

Smarter merchandising

Centra allows you to house all product data you need to drive sales, and also link this data in a meaningful way to pricing, campaigns and stock. In Centra, you can create both static and dynamic product bundles to drive increased AOV. You can also define how products should be merchandised towards different audiences. For example, a unisex t-shirt can be marketed as both “Essentials Men’s Tee” and “Classic Women’s Shirt” in separate storefronts while inventory remains unified.

Data that drives decisions

Identify best-selling colors, sizes, and styles across collections. Keep channel organization flexible with multiple category trees, while a reporting tree (“Folders”) ensures accurate sales aggregation and ERP/BI alignment.

Global reach, local relevance

Centra makes it simple to manage and distribute localized product information across markets, languages, and regions. This ensures a consistent global brand presence with local relevance.

One standout feature is size chart localization. Brands can adapt sizing standards for each region—for example, automatically converting EU shoe sizes to UK sizes or US equivalents. Centra also supports multi-dimensional charts, like denim waist/length combinations, without relying on third-party tools. The result? Fewer returns and greater customer trust.

Fuel product discovery and conversion with structured data

Centra’s PIM lets fashion brands set custom attributes at the style, color, and size levels—perfect for detailing material, fit, technical features, or sustainability credentials. Acting as a single source of truth, it pulls data from PLM, ERP, spreadsheets, and legacy systems, standardizing attributes like fiber composition, certifications, and production locations with consistent naming and taxonomy.

Rather than keeping key details in PDFs or QR codes, Centra makes product data AI- and search-ready, exposing structured, machine-actionable fields directly on product pages and pushing them to every channel. This ensures products are easily interpreted by shoppers, marketplaces, search engines, and LLMs.

The result: better product discovery, fewer returns, and faster, more confident launches.

Get DPP-ready — without rebuilding your stack

With clear ownership workflows and continuous validation, brands can keep sustainability claims, certifications, and recycling information accurate over time, and in a structured manner. Plus,  

with a flexible data model and API-first design, Centra is built to meet evolving EU Digital Product Passport requirements—while capturing richer data than compliance alone demands.

This means brands can push DPP-ready data directly to product pages and sales channels, meeting regulatory expectations while reinforcing consumer trust.

Centralize your creative assets

And it’s not just product data that needs structure—media assets are just as critical to delivering a consistent, high-converting shopping experience. With Centra’s new Product Media Library, fashion brands can manage product imagery, videos, lookbook shots, and other campaign assets from one centralized place.

By linking media directly to styles, colors, and size variants, brands can ensure every product page is up-to-date, visually compelling, and aligned across markets. Metadata like image alt text, tags, and asset types can also be managed natively—improving both SEO and accessibility without relying on third-party DAM tools or manual work.

This ultimately means faster launches, fewer content errors, and better consistency across DTC storefronts, marketplaces, and wholesale portals.

Effortless collection management

Native collection management in Centra lets brands easily create, activate, and retire collections to keep product offerings fresh and relevant. There’s no need for developers to update product descriptions and images for new collection launches. This saves time and allows teams to focus more on design and marketing.

Collections can be dynamically managed and distributed across channels via API and headless integrations, enabling quick adaptation to trends, customer preferences, and business goals.

Common use cases include:

• Merchandising: Seasonal, themed, new arrivals, bestsellers

• Marketing: Limited editions, sales, gift guides

• Customer Experience: Personalized or stylist-curated collections

• Inventory: Clearance, back in stock

• International: Region-specific, localized currency/language

• Integrations: AI recommendations (e.g., Depict.ai), social selling tools

• Sustainability: Eco-friendly or cause-related collections

Flexible bundles

Centra supports product bundles natively, letting fashion brands offer sets like swimwear tops + bottoms or any customized combinations. This boosts sales opportunities through competitive pricing and promotions.

There are two bundle types:

• Fixed bundles: Products share the same size chart or use one-size fits all. For example, a bikini set where the customer picks one size for both pieces, or a scarf paired with T-shirts in various sizes.

• Flexible bundles: Allow mixing products with different size charts and variants. For example, customers can choose bikini tops in cup sizes and bottoms in small/medium/large, or men’s suits combining jacket sizes with multi-dimensional trouser sizes—all sold at a fixed price.

Personalized product displays across channels

The ‘Displays’ feature lets products be presented differently across channels or categories, enabling personalized shopping experiences. For instance, a product could appear one way in the men’s section and another in the women’s, or be styled differently for two regional markets. This adaptability is essential in fashion ecommerce, where presentation drives engagement and conversions.

Smart product recommendations

Product relationships are essential for increasing sales and encouraging customers to buy more—whether it's on a DTC digital flagship store or through wholesale. Centra automatically links related products, like different colors or sizes of the same style, to help drive smart recommendations.

Common relation types include:

• Similar products: Suggest alternatives when a customer views a product but doesn’t add it to their cart.

• Cross-sell: Recommend complementary items after a purchase, like offering a matching scarf with a tie.

Brands can also create custom relationships to tailor recommendations for different channels. These suggestions can be shown directly or enhanced with AI for a more personalized shopping experience.

Enhanced management of luxury items

Centra supports product serial numbers (ideal for luxury fashion, accessories, and jewelry) simplifying the tracking of unique items, ensuring authenticity, and reinforcing exclusivity.

Growth starts with great product data

Scale is the goal, but only if it happens at a pace that’s supported by reliable, structured product data. Brands that prioritize keeping their data clean, organized, and accurate are the ones that experience sustained growth.

When product data is well-managed, it reduces operational headaches and creates opportunities for innovation, smoother workflows, and stronger customer loyalty. Centra brings structure to your product data—creating space for growth.