Shadowing the Vice President
This past week I got to shadow the Vice President of
Merchandising and Product Development of Soma, Janet. Janet was the one who
came to me and asked me to do so and I feel very privileged to have done so.
First Janet walked me through was she does in the morning
and then I attended a couple meetings with her and executives of the company.
I later attended the cross functional team meetings, where
each team discusses issues or pros that they have found in the past week.
Janet has asked me to do a weekly report on the Baazarvoice,
which is just going over the customer’s reviews and developing a report of
trends that have been voiced.
Intern Program
Since I am involved in the Intern program at Chico’s FAS, we
have a group[ project with five interns, which is a SWOT Analysis. Our team has
decided to revamp Soma Intimates’ website because there are a lot of things
that are lacking. During the week I put together a PowerPoint to help my team
to understand the direction in which we need to go to present the information.
We have been assigned a team leader of someone in the Chico’s
FAS company to help us along the way, during the week we had a meeting to
discuss our project and to add any ideas that she saw fit.
Projects
This week I continued to redo the Soma Fit Guide to look
more like White House| Black Markets. I also worked on updating the Master
sample guide with Dija on the technical design team, and updated any
information that the vendors sent about the new fabrics we sourced for the
limited edition fabrics for August-November.
Meetings
I attended several meetings this week including the design
review, mini stellar sellers and print approval.
The design review was a chance for Product development to
present their upcoming lines for May, June and July. This is where Janet (VP)
and the merchants have a chance to see the ideas and to make any comments that
they see necessary.
The Mini Stellar Sellers is a meeting where all of the garments
in stores for May and June are presented. The merchants go through each garment
and explain what worked, what didn’t work, and how they will improve for the
next seasons to come.
The print approval meeting was for Lounge and Dresses. The
Product development teams for these presented the prints that they chose for
the May, June and July seasons to the CAD, Trend and Color, and Product
development teams. Each team voiced their opinions of what they liked and didn’t
like and made changes based on what the Merchants line plans called for. This
meeting took a long time to complete because May and June’s prints did not really
portray the themes that Sarah (Trend and Color) researched for the concepts of
these months.
EMT
At Chico’s FAS they have a program called Emerging
Management Trainees. This is what just recent graduates do before they start
their career at Chico’s FAS. Soma Apparel is receiving a new EMT merchant and
Janet had me be the person to show her around and introduce her to
everyone. It was a chance for myself to
look back and see what I really have learned being here for 6 weeks.
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