July 15- July 19

Touch base

This week I met with one of our associate merchants, Carrie. She went over what her tasks are on a weekly basis. She goes through each full price item and adds the information that the planners send to her on Monday morning of the week’s prior sales. She makes sure that all formulas are correct and are pulling from the right excel sheet. She then goes through and marks down items still left from the month of May and then highlights any product that is meeting the APS (Average unit per store & Average unit per store plan). She enters the sell through percentage for each garment and then also what the life to date sell through is since the garment hit the store floors. Once all of these excel sheets are done the information is then sent to Janet our VP who will then present the information to other executives.

Color Matching Project

This week I had to help Sarah, the senior manager of trend and color, with a color standard ordering process. Sarah has gone through her research and found which colors she likes for the Fall and Winter 2014 collection. I then had to go to the color studio and look through Pantone standards and CSI standards finding the best match possible. Once I was done finding the correct color standard for each color trend, I then had to type an order form to send to our purchasing team to make sure that we receive a color standard of each color choice that I had chosen. Each color standard costs about $7-$15, depending on which ever company we chose the standard from.

Sketching Project

Since my team has seen that I am proficient in Adobe suite, they have given me extra projects. My newest project is taking the laces/trims that were selected for Fall and Winter 2014 and drawing them in Illustrator. These sketches will then be used to add to silhouettes that the PD team chooses for the season. Most of Soma’s teams are very visual so it is important to show the best representation of each garment before the samples are received to get the concept across.

Since my supervisor liked the sketches that I have done, I now am in charge of making concept boards for August, September, October & November limited edition lines. These will be used to better portray to Soma’s President Laurie Van Brunt, what we want for these limited edition lines. The concept boards will be of a woman wearing the silhouettes chosen with the correct laces/trims, along with a picture that best captures that month’s trend.

SWOT Analysis Project

As an intern we have a group project, our team is working on revamping the Soma website because it is not very easy to navigate or to see all the product that one may want to search for. This is a problem due to the fact that the target customer of Soma is not Tech-savvy as it is and so the website itself should be simplified. I am in charge of taking everyone’s changes and recreating the site on Adobe Photoshop. I also have put myself in charge of making sure that any change that is made has some scholarly research done to support this change. We will be presenting our project in front of executives throughout Chico’s FAS.

Meetings

Some meetings I attended this week were a vendor meeting with one of our biggest manufacturers, a line turnover meeting, a meeting with a vendor who supplies embroidery fabric to the Apparel and foundations of Soma, and a CAD approval meeting.

The vendor meeting was for us to see all of the bralettes out on the market and for the lounge team to see all the options that they have for their bralette in the upcoming seasons.

The line turnover meeting was a chance for the executives of Soma to see what will be sold for March and April 2014. Each category presents their line boards and the prints were presented. Laurie made comments about what changes she would like to see in prints and silhouettes.

The meeting with the Embroidery manufacturer was really neat to see. The company is based in Romania and China. The company presented us with their newest embroidery and Aimee and I chose the embroidery that we liked best for the limited edition sleepwear line. The company then takes our choices and scans the barcode on the embroidery, which is a way to “check-out” the embroidery.

The CAD approval meeting was for the majority of Soma apparel and foundation teams. The CAD prints for May, June and July were presented and it was mainly to see if the colors chosen are unique enough and if one color is not presented too many times.

Classroom Work

This week HR had a classroom lecture  on networking and resume building, this has been my favorite classroom meeting so far, and I feel it was very beneficial to my learning. HR went over how they select candidates and the process that they go through. We did a few activities looking at resumes that HR has received and we made changes to make them each better.