Studio GSM — Apparel product development

The brief

Apparel product development still lives in shared drives, measurement sheets, and email threads. A style might have a flat in one folder, a graded spec in another, a Pantone colourway in a chat, and the factory pack assembled by hand the night before a sample round. That friction is painful for a first drop and worse when a team is running multiple seasons at once.

Enterprise PLM tools exist, but they are heavy, expensive, and aimed at large houses. Independent designers, micro-brands, and small ateliers needed a workspace that felt like a cutting table: styles and revisions in a pipeline, points of measure on the flat, a bill of materials, fittings, and a tech pack you can actually export.

The product also had to start solo and grow with the roster. One person should be able to open a studio on day one; design, production, and admin should be invitable later without migrating to a different tool.

The build

Studio GSM was built as a custom web workspace with studio accounts, a signed-in dashboard, and a revision pipeline that shows where every style sits — concept, spec, sample, and production — without opening six tabs. Each style carries revisions, graded measurements, colourways, and sample notes so the record stays with the garment instead of living in a side spreadsheet.

Shared libraries ship with the studio: core flats, fashion TCX essentials, points of measure, and spec templates already on the shelf, with higher plans unlocking the rest of the catalogue. Brands can search Pantone swatches, attach colourways to a revision, and upload their own drawings and house colours on any plan.

Bills of materials, fittings, and downloadable tech packs sit on the same record as the spec, so factory handoff is a file from the workspace rather than a reconstructed PDF. Team invites and role-based access let a studio stay solo until sample rounds multiply, then bring the atelier in from the admin console.

Public marketing pages cover features, pipeline, libraries, teams, pricing, and FAQ; the signed-in product (dashboard, styles, libraries, billing) stays behind login. Subscriptions are per studio, priced in Australian dollars excluding GST. Tech stack: PHP (application and billing logic), Tailwind CSS (responsive UI), MySQL (studios, styles, revisions, libraries, and plans).

The result

Studio GSM launched in 2026 at studiogsm.design with a public site, waitlist, and a signed-in cutting table for styles, revisions, libraries, and tech packs. Founders can start from a first style; larger teams use the same workspace as the collection scales.

The pipeline replaces the spreadsheet-and-email loop with a single place to see what is in spec, what is in sample, and what is approved for production. Libraries and tech pack export mean flats, Pantone, and factory packs are ready without a painful cutover from existing files — most studios migrate drop by drop.

The application continues to receive product updates as waitlist studios come on and as sample rounds, factory handoffs, and team workflows shape the next features.