In this session, we explored buying and range planning and its importance in fashion merchandising.
It is important to understand what Fashion Buying and Merchandising is before analysing a product and its brand. A retail buyer focuses on products and they have to conduct lots of research on fashion trends before selecting the products that would appear online and in-store.
We worked in groups and selected a retailer brand we’re interested in working with in the future and created a visual range plan. This organises the core products, fashion products and leading-edge products into sections where we can analyse their features. We also utilised the merchandise mind map to plan the different varieties of products. These tools can be extremely helpful in the future when it comes to studying the market and how product development works; they can also be applied to your own products of predicting various events in the market.
During this session, I discovered my strength of being able to analyse things quickly and consider the reasoning behind specific choices. For example, I was able to understand the task easily and create the planning tools we learned and use them efficiently in the research tasks. However, I need to be more careful when it comes to selecting the products as I find myself choosing similar styles in the visual range plan activity. This might make it difficult for the brand to stand out and attract customers due to the same products being produced.