A Week In The Life Of A Merchandiser – Part 4

Giving you a little glimpse of what the life of a fashion merchandiser is really like during market!

THURSDAY Okay, ATS is FINALLY over. We’re in a good place with all of our product categories and now we’re into phase two of what the Merchandising team does post-market: Model Details.

Good ol’ model detail meetings. Let me explain.

Model details is a meeting with Design, Merchandising, Sourcing and (sometimes) Sales. Now that we know exactly what styles we’re booking (for the most part), we need to be sure we’re 100% confident in what we’re proceeding with. We go through every single style purchased, and look at every single thing about the garment. We call out quality changes, button color changes, model changes, review submits for added styles/colors, and anything that has changed since we developed the style. It’s a long day, but the best way for us to be on the same page before sending out changes to overseas.

Much like our ATS meetings this year, we decided to do something very different this season for model detail meetings.

We used to hold separate model details by area: Collection, Retail and Programs. And Merchandising teams used to create these documents where we would have every style purchased listed in this printed out. During the meeting, everyone would take notes by hand, and then Merchandising teams would go back to their desks and regurgitate (ew, I hate that word) all of the information that was discussed in the meeting. It was a lot of tedious work for a Merchandiser, and basically we needed an entire day to put together this email before other teams started making updates.

So we decided to change the process.

We suggested using laptops and creating a document that would be used by EVERYONE at the time of the meeting. This document would not only replace the model detail email, but would also ensure that every team was in charge of taking their own notes instead of relying on the email. So me, my boss, and two other Merchandisers came up with a new document and system for Summer ’18 model details. Our new process now demanded that we spend an entire day (literally 9:30AM-6PM) on laptops working on filling out this new document in advance. That means: style number, colors, qualities, and changes needed to be in the chart before our meetings. And all of our categories were combined. So there were A LOT of styles between our teams. It was a lot of work up front, but we knew it would be worth it once the other teams saw it. We also knew it would save us a lot of work and tedious effort post-meeting. So we kept moving along (Chik-Fil-A was 100% involved).

By 6PM, we were exhausted. I couldn’t look at my computer screen any longer, but I felt good about having everything completed for tomorrow’s first new model detail meeting — Knits.

Check back tomorrow for the LAST part of my first mini-series: A Week In The Life Of A Fashion Merchandiser!

Check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.