Lectra
Lectra Customer Success Story
Harmont & Blaine constructs a new internationalization strategy on
the powerful duo of in-house creativity and Lectra’s Kaledo®
Paolo Montefusco, design
project manager,
Harmont & Blaine, Italy
“Creativity is something we
have inside of us. Kaledo
supports our creativity and
makes all the mechanical
design activities go faster.
Now we have more time to
devote to new ideas.”
Kaledo
A Revolution in Fashion
Design
Kaledo optimizes creative
fashion development by
streamlining the design
processes for fabrics, styles,
and collections within a
collaborative working
environment. Everything
from design history to future
collections is available at
the touch of a fingertip.
Kaledo’s user-friendly style and easy-access database has revolutionized
Harmont & Blaine’s design process.
Harmont & Blaine (Italy) sportswear collections provide a “total look”
for fashionable men worldwide. Their famous “basset hound” label can be
found on a wide range of products: trousers, jackets, shoes, belts, and
especially shirts and knitwear, their core business. The 2007 opening of Harmont
& Blaine’s prestigious show room in the heart of Milan’s fashion center was listed
in the official Milan Men's Fashion calendar. It marked a new step forward in
the international success of the casual brand with the highest growth rates in
the sector for the last ten years. Through its intrinsic values and its collections,
Harmont & Blaine promotes a positive brand image which has been
represented by famous athletes, such as Fabio Cannavaro, who symbolize
optimism, professionalism, strong personal values, and the joy of life.
A brand on the verge of greater internationalization and a public offering
In 2007, Harmont & Blaine’s popularity grew significantly, opening an
exciting opportunity for growth and internationalization. Charged with this
reinforced momentum, the brand’s principals set a goal to go public by 2010—
an exciting yet challenging objective for the 13 year-old company.
“Listing our shares on the stock exchange implies a lot of issues,
especially internationalizing our products in a shorter time frame than what’s
required for private companies,” said Paolo Montefusco, Harmont & Blaine’s
design project manager. “And of course, meanwhile, we still want to continue
an increasingly winning approach to our collections and to our organization.
It’s a tough challenge,” he said. “But it’s one that we want absolutely to win.” ® Kaledo is a registered trademark of Lectra, Inc.
Montefusco realized that the most successful strategy for these
ambitious goals was to rethink their design process. Their conventional method
of turning pencil sketches into dozens of physical prototypes, checking style
consistency with the archives, and managing lengthy paper trails could not be
compatible with the new future of the faster, more frequent, and more
internationalized collections of the Harmont & Blaine label. A powerful design
software was clearly the right path for the company’s future. But with the many
choices available, making the right decision was crucial.
“The role of these instruments in the successful growth of our company
could not be underestimated,” Montefusco said. “As a business grows, its whole
design and development process becomes more difficult. We really needed
something that would support our creativity and shorten the time-to-market.”
Accessibility to prior designs and ideas was a priority for Harmont &
Blaine designer Ettore Aruta. “I needed to be able to draw in real time but also
pull from a database to update or recommence sketches that were designed
in the past,” he said.
 Huge design potential, accelerated process, first class support
After several evaluations and trials of various software design
products, Harmont & Blaine selected Lectra’s new Kaledo Collection.
Kaledo Collection is a state-of-the-art professional design software
platform developed especially by Lectra’s research and development teams
for fashion designers. It delivers a visual, virtual environment for creating and
managing fashion collections and offers a multitude of design options and
possibilities. Processes are streamlined and tedious tasks eliminated, resulting in
maximum efficiency. Design assets are shared in a central fashion-dedicated
repository. And Kaledo’s unique collaborative environment—the only one of
its kind on the market—facilitates information exchanges and accelerates
approvals throughout the product lifecycle.
Kaledo is exactly the kind of software that this ambitious, forward-
thinking fashion brand needed.
“It was the obvious choice because of its huge design potential for
our new product lines we’ve been planning to launch,” Aruta said.
Kaledo’s user-friendly style and easy-access database has
revolutionized Harmont & Blaine’s design room. “We used to have to waste
time searching through folders and computer files to pull up our archived
sketches,” said Aruta. “Now all we have to do is type in the product code and
we can get started on the design upgrade right away.”
The accelerated process and reinforced creativity made possible by
Kaledo Collection was exactly what Montefusco and Aruta were looking for.
“Creativity is something we have inside of us,” Montefusco said. “Kaledo
supports our creativity and makes all the mechanical design activities go
faster. Now we have more time to devote to new ideas.”
“When we think up a product or a sketch of a shirt or an accessory, for
example, we can just draw it up and change it in real time, with respect to
textiles, styles, and colors,” Aruta said. “Now that we have Kaledo, all of our
decisions are accelerated because we can visualize the options, very
realistically, right there on the screen.”
Aruta also discovered benefits with Kaledo that surpassed his
expectations in design software. “The symmetrical drawing feature was a
genuine innovation for me,” he said. “Now, not only can I have lots of new
design possibilities and faster drawing speed, but I can also scan textiles and
design and select colors for the textiles I want to use and apply that to a
whole series of products.”
Lectra’s first class customer service and training optimized Harmont &
Blaine’s knowledge of Kaledo, maximizing their benefits from the program and
the services and leading them to full autonomy. “The support was constant,
from the very beginning through to the training days and beyond,” Aruta said.
“Now we feel very independent in the product’s management, and that’s a
terrific advantage and means optimum efficiency in the design department.”
“Kaledo is an immediate way to pass from a concept, an idea, to a
visual representation,” said Montefusco. “It’s a clear must for anyone working
in the industry in 2008.”

ABOUT LECTRA
Lectra is the world leader in integrated technology solutions that automate, streamline and accelerate product
design, development and manufacturing processes for the soft goods industries. Lectra develops the most
advanced specialized software, cutting systems, and provides associated services to a broad array of markets
including fashion (apparel, accessories, footwear), automotive (car seats and interiors, airbags), aeronautical,
marine and furniture. Lectra serves 20,000 customers in more than 100 countries, with 1,550 employees. The
company is listed on Euronext Paris

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