ORORO has grown from a small Kansas City startup in 2015 to the most trusted heated apparel brand in the United States, serving over two million customers with rechargeable heated jackets, vests, and accessories. The brand’s product line spans outerwear, workwear, and lifestyle collections — each featuring proprietary carbon fibre heating technology and UL-certified batteries. With design teams in both the US and China and all manufacturing based in China, cross-border collaboration is central to how every product gets made.
Before Rechain, that collaboration ran on Google Drive, Excel files, and AI-generated drawings — with no system tying them together. Product information was scattered across folders, unsearchable, and disconnected from the actual development process. Documents were static snapshots saved in a drive, not living records that evolved alongside the product.
The team had no standardised way to organise product information, and tracking changes meant creating manual change logs that were difficult to maintain. For a brand operating across two countries, the friction compounded quickly. Information sharing between the US design team and the China-based product development team relied on emails, Slack messages, and files pushed back and forth through Google Drive.
There was no single place to look up the history of a development, review sample feedback, or check the current state of a style. Mark Hu, CEO and Co-Founder, knew the team needed an apparel-specific PLM — something cloud-based, with a modern interface, and backed by a development team that could iterate quickly.
We had all this information scattered around in Google Drive — not searchable, not organised in a way that the team can collaborate. The documents were snapshots of the process, isolated from product development itself.
When Mark evaluated Rechain, three criteria mattered: a modern interface, cloud-native architecture, and a responsive development team. Rechain met all three on first impression — and the onboarding confirmed it.
Mark was comfortable navigating Rechain within a couple of days. The broader team — designers in the US and product developers in China — were up and running within two weeks. The simplicity of the product meant no heavy training was required, and there was no legacy data migration to slow things down.
The most significant shift was moving from scattered files and messages to one centralised platform where both the US and China teams collaborate on every style. The sampling and review process now lives entirely in Rechain. Comments, feedback history, and approval status are all accessible in one location. Built-in translation features further bridge the gap between the English-speaking US team and the Chinese-speaking production team.
Over the months since onboarding, the ORORO team has seen Rechain continuously ship new features and improvements — many directly informed by customer feedback. The team plans to expand usage to cover additional aspects of product development.
Before, it was just emails and photos sent through Google Drives. Now we actually have a platform where all the information is in one place and people can share, comment, and collaborate. For me, it’s a lifesaver to have one place where I can look up things and the history of comments.
Every product ORORO develops now starts in Rechain. The platform has replaced the scattered Google Drive and Excel process entirely as the system of record for product development. The reduction in communication overhead — fewer emails, fewer Slack messages, no more manually sorting files and creating folders — has been substantial.
The team’s feedback has been consistently positive, and ORORO plans to expand its use of the platform in the coming months to standardise additional parts of the development process. As a signal of confidence in Rechain’s trajectory, Mark expressed interest in exploring investment in the company — an endorsement that goes beyond any testimonial.
I really like the platform and how you’re very proactively developing new features. All our products start with Rechain now — it’s become the place where we go for everything.
