Our group spent the past four months meeting with Wild Rye, interviewing industry professionals, diving deep into the apparel production process, visiting a fashion design and apparel development company in Guangzhou, China and analyzing previous sales records. The greatest areas of opportunity for the company are in refining Wild Rye’s ability to forecast in two functions: 1) forecasting trends (to speed up the production process and deliver more predictable launches) and 2) forecasting their sales, which are currently based on rough estimates of 100% growth year-over-year across all categories. To develop solutions for trend forecasting, we analyzed their end-to-end product lifecycle, mapping out the entire process and finding areas of opportunity. After meeting with apparel manufacturer Ecico in China, we discovered multiple tools for improving Wild Rye’s PLM: right-sizing their supplier, ensuring contracts include discounting, and using trend forecasting software tools. Discussions and interviews with industry professionals revealed additional solutions to Wild Rye’s trend forecasting needs, like crowdfunding, comp shopping and influencer partnering. With greater transparency into their production life-cycles, they are better positioned to stay on top of their deadlines and not lose valuable time to simply coordinating moving parts. To address the sales forecasting, we looked to the Kanban method, a process that looks at historical sales to develop “triggers” that identify when restocks are needed. Considering Wild Rye’s supplier delays, the Kanban method gives them visibility into future production needs. This is especially useful given Wild Rye’s limited cash flow, as it shows with restocks are in highest need. This tool will allow them to clearly look back at their internal data and quantitatively prepare for the future. With these two scalable solutions — an optimized PLM and a Kanban template — Wild Rye’s operations strategy can quickly catch up to their co-founders’ goals and position them for success moving forward.