July 29- August 2

Projects

This week I continued to make changes to the Limited Edition concept boards. I started designing the new Holiday boards and was conversing with the vendors to make changes on the limited edition fabric we have chosen. The concept boards were also presented to the VP's of the foundations side as well as the lounge and sleepwear side. Callout's were made by the foundations team to see if the scale of our embroidery could be reduced because the scale as of now would not work well on panties.

I have also been communicating for the past couple weeks with vendors on styles that have been dropped before they have even gone through production. I requested to do this as part of my project for back at school, and my team thought that it was a great way for me to really get a hands on experience of how the Product development process works. I now have had these samples made and they are for the January and February corsets. The vendors do not know that these samples will not be used but for my learning only I have had these samples produced with my own minor tweaks on print, trim, color and notion choices.

Presentation

This week all of the intern groups presented their SWOT analysis projects. My group came up with enhancing the direct to consumer experience through improving the Soma website. Many of the changes we made were aesthetic but also navigational improvements.

During the week we did a few mock presentations for different people in Soma. Each mock presentation we were given feedback. Our final presentation was in front of about 30 people and were people from all of Chico's FAS brands and positions. The main judges of our presentations were three recruiters from HR.

The recruiters then had to choose 3 of the 10 groups to present to Chico's FAS president, David Dyer. To my excitement my group was chosen as one of the best groups!
So the upcoming week will be a lot of preparation and feedback from others who saw our presentation to make it the best it can be to present to David Dyer and other executives.

Meetings

I attended one of the " Most Amazing Places to Work" Lunch and Learn activities. The e-commerce teams came in and presented all of the information about Soma's social media outlets. All facts were presented and ways of improving each network was discussed. The presentation was very interesting and many exciting facts were shared.

MAPS meeting I attended and all of the cross function teams came to discuss any issues that were going on and what can be done to fix these issues.

I also attended the Lounge and Sleepwear PI Debrief. This was held by HR and each employee was given their results from their PI debrief. We learned what type of person each employee was and what we can do as a team to best support their needs. It was crazy to see how much everyone's PI's were like them. This was a great way to really get to know your teams. I found it really interesting that the cross functional teams were very similar by position and their type of PI.

This week I was asked to interview for the Executive Management Trainee Program which is for current college graduates. The HR team set up time with us to go over what the interview process will be like and to answer any questions about the EMT program that we may have. I am really excited to interview for this.