How efficient in collection management are you and your team members?
As a merchandiser, your core responsibility ties back to efficiency and insights – how quickly you are able to deliver a relevant, appealing collection within short time frames. But as a leader, you’re responsible for ensuring your team’s success through continuous improvement. To further complicate matters, in today’s fashion industry context, timelines are shorter and budgets are tighter as speed-to-market continues to increase and consumer expectations rise for quality, fit and price. You need an adaptive approach that is able to keep up.
In short, in order to excel in merchandising today, you need to:
- Meet extremely tight deadlines because of shorter trend cycles
- Work with other teams involved in the design-to-production process
- Stay relevant by identifying and jumping on the right trends
- Analyze product data coming from all parts of the lifecycle and sales data from retail touchpoints to make better-informed decisions about your future collections.
Focusing on 3 areas of the product lifecycle
The trick is to constantly re-evaluate how effective you and your team members are in the collection planning and development process. Step out a little and look at the big picture. We’ve highlighted three critical areas to explore in assessing your team’s ability to leverage data insights, make informed decisions and collaborate for ultimate efficiency:
- Collection planning
- Teamwork and systems
- Insights and analytics