July 22- July 26

Meetings

To start off the week I had a touch base with Janet, VP of Merchandising & Product development. She gave me the meetings she wanted me to attend with her this week and projects she has for me to do. Since Janet is very busy, in many cases I will be attending things for her such as the lunch and learn and then letting her know any information or news that is important

I had my P.I. debrief, which is meeting with HR to talk about my results from the personality test I took when I applied. She went over what everything meant and then gave me the results and summary to keep for the future.

I met with Sara Stensrud, VP of HR, at a roundtable meet and greet. She talked about how she got to where she is now, and all of the interns she did that she didn’t like, and ultimately ended up in HR. She said it took her 20 years to figure out what exactly she wanted to do when she “grew up”. She was very personable and was eager to get to know all of us that attended.

I attended two meetings to present the concept boards I created. I took feedback from all that attended and tweaked the garments to what the foundations team decided on doing for their sketches. This was a really great learning experience and I was really happy how everyone responded to the boards.

The Holiday Mailer Meeting was a very interesting meeting, this was to go over the Holiday Mailer. The marketing team presented their sketched spreads and then presented the product that will be shown. Laurie Van Brunt (Soma President) made corrections and changes to what she would like to see on each spread.

The Stellar Sellers Meeting was the largest meeting I have attended yet. The entire company of Soma was in this meeting. The merchants of each category talked about the sales and why certain product did not sell and why they thought others were better, and what they are going to do for next year differently. Laurie lead the meeting and asked questions and made comments about what she has seen with sales and what needs to be different.

Projects

This week the majority of my time was spent creating concept boards for the Limited Edition lines for August, September, October, November and December months. I had to take images from our trend and concept director and decide which inspirational photos really captured the theme and concept we were trying to convey. I did not have much direction so I just created boards that were not too over the top but that definitely were intriguing to the viewer. These boards are a new way to show Laurie Van Brunt the direction in which the limited edition collections are going, and to visually show her what the garments will look like without having the samples. I sketched the fabrics and then also sketched the garments to match the artsy models on the boards. This has been my favorite project.

Also this week I researched what is going on in Social media and created an outline to give to Janet so that she could inform others in new directions Soma can go in Social media.

Next week is our Intern SWOT analysis presentation, so a lot of time this week has been spent preparing our presentation. I am in charge of all of the Photoshop parts of our project which is updating the Soma website to what we think the new changes should be, based on research. I enjoyed being in charge of the creative side of the project as well as leading the direction in which our team wants to go with the research. I was able to use my knowledge from the courses I have taken in the APDMT program and to explain to my team the importance of having facts to back up the changes you would like to make.

Corset Walk Through

This week I went to one of the corset walk through at a local mall. The corset is run by the marketing team and they present to all of the teams at Soma what the “September” corset will look like. They completely remove the entire product currently in the store and replace the product with samples that each team has received for September. Laurie then goes through and makes comments about what she likes and doesn’t like. The highlight of the corset was that every team was able to see the new panty riser tables that have been purchased so that the customer can easily shop the panty tables. This new table holds double of what the risers could before and for the most part all of the product carried will be able to fit in every size on the new risers.

Vendor Meeting

Soma is a very small company employee wise, so every position has a lot of hats to manage. This being said I sometimes take the place of some of the PD team and go into meetings without them. I attended a vendor meeting where the vendor presented all of the new lace and trims to me and the foundation team. We then went through and marked the fabrics we liked and then took all of those samples to the limited edition meetings to present to the rest of our teams. What I love about Soma is that they allow me as an intern to have an opinion, and that they trust my taste to attend these meetings alone.