A Week In The Life Of A Fashion Merchandiser – Part 5

My first ever mini series, A Week In The Life Of A Fashion Merchandiser, gives you a glimpse at what I do every day from 9-to-5!

In the last part of this series, you’ll see how everything comes together from ATS to the model detail meeting.

FRIDAY The day is finally here: Our first model detail meeting with the new format. I think our entire Merchandising team had some nerves going into this meeting. We obviously wanted everything to run smoothly, but knew it was the first time implementing a new process with a lot of different teams.

LUCKILY…everything went as smooth as it could! The meeting took all day, but it was really efficient. I felt like our Design and Sourcing teams really understood the new process and were totally on board with the changes. We started out with wovens, which is such a long category — there are A LOT of styles and we had to be smart when it came to aligning (whether it was on a style, color, certain model or quality). As a fashion merchandiser team, we have to make sure that we thoroughly review our notes from ATS meetings simultaneously, making sure we’re not missing ANYTHING that needs to be discussed with Design. Overall, this new set up really helped us fashion Merchandisers post-meeting. Instead of sitting at our desks after the meeting for hours to recap the meeting (sometimes this took a day and a half), we were able to have all of the information in one place and each team was responsible for adding their own notes.

It was nice to have all teams in one room for the entire day. Of course, a lot of work had to get done, but our team loves having fun. So we definitely had a lot of laughs, cookies for breakfast, pizza for lunch, and a coffee break towards the end of the day. Honestly, the people I work with really make my fashion merchandiser job so easy and fun. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel like work!

After this meeting, I went back to my desk to look over the document and make sure I added what I was responsible for (correct marketing and trims, color adds/style adds, etc.). Since it was Friday, I was NOT going to worry about anything once it hit about 5:30 — ooooops, sorry not sorry. We already had all of the other charts completed since we did everything on Thursday, so that was a huge help. Basically, we left work on Monday putting wovens behind us (before sending it out to overseas a week later) and needed to mentally prepare for the two other product categories on Monday and Tuesday.

Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

And that concludes my first ever mini series of what it’s like at my fashion merchandiser 9-to-5 job! I hope you enjoyed getting a little peek at what I do on a daily basis. I really loved sharing more about what I do as a fashion merchandiser because I personally LOVE hearing what people do for their careers. I’d love to hear about what you do — so please let me know in the comment section below. And as always, if you have ANY questions about being a fashion merchandiser, don’t hesitate to ask!

photo by allie provost