Evaluating efficiency: 3 areas to assess for merchandising team effectiveness.

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 

Read this e-guide to find out more.

Team's ability and collection management, time to grade your performance

Your core responsibilities tie back to efficiency and insights – how quickly you’re able to deliver a timely, relevant, balanced collection that serves the business and is irresistible to customers. But it doesn’t stop there. To further complicate matters, 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.

When’s the last time you thought about your team’s efficiency (or lack thereof)? To make improvements – and keep up with the staggering pace of the industry – you should constantly re-evaluate how you go about developing compelling collections that earn you high marks. To help you in this process, we’ve identified three critical areas to explore in assessing your team’s ability to capitalize on insights, make informed decisions and collaborate for ultimate efficiency – and success.

Why you need a product data ?

Tracking profit margins, best-sellers, popular fabrics, product categories and more can have its complexities, and managing all the moving parts can create one of the biggest sources of inefficiency. Many organizations today stumble and fall behind when making decisions. They’re relying on hunches – or even worse, inaccurate information – to plan the next course of action. And it’s not necessarily because there’s not enough data. Nowadays, most fashion leaders find themselves buried in it. They’re spending an insane amount of time wading through it all. In order to change the narrative here, fashion leaders have to get concrete about what types of data they need, and how they can make it accessible and in a format that is easy to manage. With so much to do – and increasingly less time to do it – tackling the data-management problem should be at the top of the priority list. Examine your organization and whether access to data is streamlined… or siloed, outdated or fragmented. If this problem were to be fixed, think about other value-added tasks you and your team could work on instead. While it’s an absolute necessity to have access to data to deliver a relevant, balanced collection, it shouldn’t be a painful process. Efficiency is all about eliminating the waste of efforts and energy. If your team spends a lot of time interpreting, consolidating and wading through data, then you’re squandering productivity and the larger contributions you and your team could make to the larger organization.