Retail Merchandising And Product Development Weekly Work: Fill & Download for Free

It depends on which company you work for and the career path chosen. Every brand has a culture and depending on the job, the experiences can be different. In general, fashion is high pressure with lots of deadlines and working with people from all over the world. Some companies have opportunities to travel to Europe and Asia, others you don't. I have worked in 4 different divisions of Fashion.Design Assistant:(Small Company)I got the chance to create and design products. Everyday was different because there were new milestones set everyday. I got to go out shopping for inspiration, build color palettes and set up the show room. I loved it, but the hours were long. On average the design team works the longest hours in the company. (Opportunities to travel) (attend fashion events)Fashion Assistant/Production: (BROOKS BROTHERS)I worked with the design team, merchandising and production. I liked siting in on development meetings and working with samples, but the position was based heavily on data entry. ( Travel to China possible)Showroom Dresser:(LANVIN)I dressed models for Market Week, which, is a special preview of collections for Fashion Buyers. It is like a fashion week runway show, but in a retail store setting. It was an amazing experience to work closely with the models.Product Development:(COACH)Creative based with aspects of design and some production monitoring. I love it! The hours are more 9-5 versus Design who works until 10pm and at times come in on weekends. I get to work on products and mix color palettes plus attend fashion events. We have team outings, pizza Friday's and lots of fun things. It feels like hanging out with friends at work while doing what I love.This analysis is based on my personal experience, but everyone's experience is different. I hope this helps!Fashion Career Advisor Blogwww.instagram.com/fashioncareeradvisor_

We find, upon climbing past the higher branches, that we all can fly.—Richard FariñaA restless energy stirs many of our young people, pushing them to explore, to create, to express, to serve causes and ideals. But, just when they are ready to tackle life, we consign them to an overwhelmingly passive experience, isolated from the real world, and call that their education.At the same time, there are accomplished people at a certain stage in life who long to impart what they have learned and experienced to the generation on the brink of adulthood. Yet, our society, unlike some others, does more to bar than to abet the channeling of this collective wisdom to our youth.Pathway Schools are about establishing that channel.Pathway Schools are about pairing those youth ready to take on the issues of the world with those men and women who have made it their life to know those issues.Handing over real problems and real questions to our young instead of known solutions and pat answers is not just a clever way to revitalize education. It is how to bring the most open, curiosity-driven and elastic minds among us to bear on the problems of the day. If we want optimum solutions to the problems and opportunities before us, we will assist our youth in applying their energy and imagination to them today.Pathway Schools will provide a place where students construct their individual dreams and missions and where they develop the abilities and confidence to sustain the pursuit of their dreams.What will be the result of the Pathway Schools? Young people charged with a sense of purpose, accomplished and self-assured. Young people well on their way to mastering the work, study, interpersonal and conceptual skills that will see them through life. And young people already beginning to contribute to the economic, spiritual, intellectual, artistic and political fabric of our society.—from the intro to the Pathway Schools plan.The idea behind Pathways Schools, private secondary schools that can be started as a community effort, is not to do away with tuition, except on the basis of need, but to have students complete their study money ahead the old-fashioned way—they earn it.The idea further is to give the students an absolutely unfair advantage in getting into preferred college programs, in their careers and in life by providing what our public schools do not, indeed what very few schools do.Each Pathway School consists of multiple schools. Four are known by their mottoes: I serve, I explore, I create and I express. These are each home to a number of individual Pathways, which is the pairing of proven expertise in an area with young demonstrated talent and enthusiasm for that area. Students get accepted into the larger school essentially by being “hired” into a Pathway.The fifth school is Matrix—a combination of customary secondary courses plus life skills, recreation and others.Pathways will pursue a number of ways to become a lifelong resource for its graduates and they, in turn, for the school. The school will develop a number of financial avenues to support its students in further education and in business.To give you a more concrete idea, a hypothetical Pathway. The plan was presented to a number of potential corporate sponsors, who were uniformly enthusiastic about the potential to influence career education. This included donating outdated equipment, internships, engaging paid projects, loaning out employees to teach specialty classes and sponsoring Pathways related to their field.A Fashion PathwayA hypothetical scenarioA Pathway devoted to students who desire a career in fashion was established in the “I Create” School by a woman with career and teaching experience in fashion design. She approached an apparel manufacturer, a cosmetics company and a fashion retailer and received a generous endowment. With these funds, she was able to line up two part-time teachers, one with a background in cosmetics, the other in garment manufacturing. She also brings in adjunct teachers from time to time for subjects such as textiles, hair styling, retail and merchandising, and she was able to set up a small sewing operation.With 10 to 12 students selected each year from among more than 200 applicants, the Pathway quickly became one of the larger and most sought-after on campus.Among the criteria for selection are poise during interviews, a demonstrated “eye” for colors and patterns and a portfolio of the applicant’s own fashion illustrations.The last two-week session of summer is used each year for a retreat. Staff along with current and entering students take over a wing of a hotel in San Francisco and spend their time in a variety of projects and shopping forays but mostly getting to know each other. After that, the entering class is occupied with school-orientation classes, but, in the hour and a half the new students have each day in their Pathway, they engage in exercises to “invent” their curriculum for the year ahead. The exercises also help foster group cohesion and trust.Students seem always to be keen on learning fashion design and illustration.Beyond that, some classes tend more toward hair styling and make-up, some toward modeling and some toward sewing and making clothes. There was even one class she dubbed her “accessories” class because their interest centered around shoes, purses and jewelry. For second-year students and up, the chair likes to offer, if there is not too much objection, academically-oriented classes such as fashion history, textile manufacturing, inventory management, merchandising and fashion journalism. One required math course deals with measures and proportions; the other is geared to calculating production yields, costs and retail price margins. One class in the third year and two the final year are taught entirely in French to prepare students for study or internship in Paris or Geneva.The students have to keep up with a wide range of publications, including a couple in French.Apart from French, which the chair expects all of her students to master, the students take what courses they will from Matrix and in the other Pathways.Some of the students take the bulk of their extra studies in chemistry or other sciences, but most take extra coursework in either fine arts and photography or in business-oriented study.The chair looks to the Polymer Chemistry Pathway for courses on the chemistry of cosmetics and textiles and to the Physics Pathway for one on light and color. Her students work with the Drama Pathway on costume design and provide classes in wardrobe selection and in makeup to interested students and staff. They also help frequently with costumes for museum displays.The students have created an Aroma Library of vials containing more than 300 scents used in perfumes and other cosmetics. Students enjoy spending time learning to identify the various fragrances. Six of the students are working with one of the student’s mentor and with help from an instructor in the Multimedia Pathway to produce a website on American fashion styles by decade.This Pathway gets a particularly rich flow of guest lecturers each year, many of whom stay an extra day or two to participate in projects or to comment on students’ work. The students spend one two-week session on a cotton farm at harvest time. They also get to participate in the harvesting and producing of wool, silk and linen as well as visit plants making synthetic fibers. The two-week study of the shops of Rodeo Drive and the six weeks in Manhattan visiting the major design houses are major highlights for the students. In alternating years, the third- and fourth-year students take tours of garment firms in Seoul, Tokyo, Manila and Hong Kong or of retailers and designers in London, Paris, Geneva and Milan.To raise money for the Pathway, the students operate a clothing shop and a styling parlor on campus. Each year they put on a teen fashion show that has grown so popular that it attracts wide media attention including coverage last year by two fashion magazines. In the spring, they raise money by offering image consulting to students and staff, and at Christmas they raise money with perfumes and other toiletries they make. Last year, these enterprises added more than $90,000 to the Pathway’s operating budget (or about $2,000 per student).Students often work with the seamstresses in the sewing room to prototype their designs, which are then shopped to leading teen garment labels. The students also work with a hospital and a nursing home to make and alter clothing for those with disfiguring deformities. The students enjoy a wealth of options for outside work—the original endowing companies set up internships and work-study programs, and they have since been joined by several other companies. Some of the students have made substantial money modeling or as teen merchandising consultants for outside companies.About half the students go on to one- or two-year internships, usually overseas, after graduation. The others enroll in fashion programs in such institutions as the California Academy of the Arts, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, or the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. While these schools do not offer much in the way of financial assistance, the Pathway has been successful in establishing a large scholarship endowment from a wide range of sponsors. Most of the students attend college on full scholarship or close to it.

Stores like the ones you mentioned purchase from a wide range of brands who operate on completely disparate fashion calendars and production schedules.As a result, the stores place orders from brands in different ways. Generally speaking, however, brands could be bifurcated into these categories.Traditional ready-to-wear / luxury brands generally present at fashion weeks around the world including New York, London, Paris, Milan, Seoul, and Tokyo, among others. Buying teams or representatives from stores attend the shows to see the collections. The following week, brands open their showrooms where buyers from the stores come in to see specific pieces in detail and place their orders. If a representative from the store can not attend, it is technically possible to do this all remotely. This happens a minimum of twice a year for Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter collections, but can be much more frequent as pre-collections become increasingly popular. Brands compile the orders from all the stores and spend the next multiple months producing the quantities of pieces ordered. (This is also the reason the fashion calendar is offset - Spring fashion shows happen in the fall so the orders can be produced and shipped to stores by spring time)Alternative or streetwear labels like the ones found at Dover Street Market and Ssense generally do not present shows at fashion week. Sometimes, these brands setup small showrooms during Fashion Weeks to allow store buyers to see their products in person. Other brands simply send stores images of samples and order sheets, which the buyers then use to decide on purchase quantities. Production times vary widely in this category, as some streetwear brands can produce T-shirts in a period of days, while others need months to develop complicated pattern work and receive orders from international factories.To synthesize, buyers from these stores identify brands that fit the type of client they’d like to serve and seek out their collections. They may attend fashion week to see shows of ready-to-wear labels, or they may simply email a t-shirt brand with a request for an order. The best stores ensure that they are constantly receiving new product from different brands to keep their customers interested and coming back. This is an important facet of merchandising strategy to keep in mind when planning to open your own store.