The term, “fashion department,” is trade shorthand for those departments devoted to female apparel and accessories. It is in these departments that style changes are swift, general, challenging and sometimes confusing.
The techniques for handling such volatile merchandise are necessarily different from those that prevail in departments that enjoy a solid core of imperceptibly changing staples.
The buyer who can successfully manage a fashion department is also different from those who operate departments where style changes are slower and less general.
The buyer who can handle style changes that occur at the rates that prevail in fashion departments has to be a special sort of person, with special skills and special personal characteristics.
Retail management has pretty clear ideas as to the person's qualifications for tackling such assignments, the performance it expects in the job, and the help it is prepared to give.
Management’s View of the Job
Retail management looks upon the fashion buyer as the interpreter of current fashion trends for his department. As a buyer, you are expected to be the fountainhead of ideas and excitement about your department's merchandise, and the source of information about that merchandise. You are the liaison between management and your department; between your store and your market; between your department and the rest of the store.
Buying Is Not All
Buying, or the selection and purchase of goods, is the most obvious element of the job, but it is by no means all of it. Other activities come before and after the actual buying, and are quite as vital to successful performance.
Preparation for buying includes such responsibilities as:
- keeping abreast of fashion
- analyzing customer demand
- planning assortments that will be balanced against that demand
- coordinating the department's assortments with those of related departments in the store.
- spearheading the department's sales promotion efforts
- infusing the selling staff with information and enthusiasm about the merchandise.
- maintaining an inventory within the financial limits set by management
- achieving the sales and profit goals management has set for the department
- maintaining good morale among employees
- handling relationships with customers, employees, and the market in such a way as to enhance the store's good name.
So, if you rejoice in the title of buyer, beware of letting that title give you the impression that management values you and judges your performance solely on the basis of how you discharge your buying duties. Yours is a bigger job than that.
Importance of Teamwork
In discussing, retail management lays great stress upon the capacity for teamwork as a fundamental qualification for fashion buying.
This is so because customers today buy a look rather than a style, and they expect stores to offer them all the components of the look they choose. No fashion department therefore can safely move independently of the others.
Should there be a change in dress silhouette or skirt length, let us say, there will be corresponding changes in coats, sportswear, intimate apparel, shoes, handbags, hosiery, jewelry, scarves, gloves, millinery, belts.
No element of the costume changes without affecting all the others to some degree. Therefore the activities of each fashion buyer in a store necessarily interlock with those of all the others. In no other division of the store does management call upon so many buyers to mesh their activities so quickly and so closely as in the fashion division.
In the fashion departments, the most brilliant of solo performers is seldom as valuable to a store as persons of even modest attainments who know how to function as members of a team.
Follow-Through
One of the most important elements of is often summed up by management as "follow-through". By this, management means seeing that whatever is necessary to run the department properly and to serve its customers well is part of - even if the particular task is officially the responsibility of some other executive.
For example, even though housekeeping is not officially part of a buyer's job, no fashion buyer can expect to sell smart fashion merchandise in a neglected or messy department. Good buyers like the head of some of the country's most elegant and successful specialty shops, find themselves unconsciously picking scraps of paper up from the selling floor, or straightening mussed displays, or even pinching dead leaves from decorative flower arrangements. To a fashion merchant, the surroundings and the merchandise are both important.
Anything that benefits the department becomes part of the fashion buyer’s job. Maintaining a tidy department can be quite as important as canvassing the market for someone to produce experimentally a style in a fashion trend that is so new it has barely been conceived. Seeing that necessary things get done is basic to the buyer's job.
There are many roads, all interesting, all rewarding, that are open to you, once you have mastered.
You should be warned; however, that fashion retailing gets into one's blood. Few people who have made a success in the field can find any other career quite so satisfying.
