First Update About Product Management Internship at a German Luxury Fashion Company

Hello everyone,

My third month as an intern in the product management team has just started. Since my last blog entry, it has been a very busy time in the office due to forced process changes that occurred as a result of Covid-19. Since this department is in close contact with many other departments within the collection production process, such as Design, Operations and Sales, ever since there are many face-to-face meetings detained during the entire collection creation process. During one calendar year there are four collections designed based on the four seasons (Pre-Spring, Spring/Summer, Pre-Fall and Fall/Winter), each including three phases (pre-sales phase, sales phase and after sales phase).

Now that the world is restricted when it comes to personal contact and business travels and the company must generate liquid assets while reducing liabilities many procedures have to be adapted accordingly. 

On the one hand, sales clients from retail and wholesale customers can, for example, not attend the Pre-Sales collection handover in the showroom in Germany as it has been handled until now. Hitherto, all salespeople from all over the world were invited into the showroom in Germany for the collection presentation, happening four times a year. However, this pandemic does not allow such get-togethers and using Photoshop and InDesign, we created presentations and overviews to make it a vividly digital experience. We have been busy digitalising all Colour Cards (cards that include all style specifications for the relevant fabrics). The major challenge was to actually visualise the fabrics in a very good quality. In case the vendors are slightly bigger, many fabrics are digital already. But as the company also sources from very small vendors, those fabrics are most likely not digital yet. 

On the other hand, collections complexities (depth and width) for the Pre-Spring and Spring/Summer collections in 2021 had to be cut at the same time. Therefore, our department was in charge to reconsider all styles for the upcoming collections. This required fast action because they were already set up and ready for production. Instead of focusing on the next collections only, we had to revise everything and cut it by about 30% while considering all regulations and wishes. In other words: every third item had to be removed. Based on figures and facts from previous seasons, decisions were taken in consultation with the designers, operations team and those customers having the highest turnover. Nonetheless, it was also partly determined on the basis of experiences and gut feelings. Hence, amongst others I have been analysing margins, order units and order volumes and compared these with, for example, minimum margins that got to be achieved anyhow. 

In the meanwhile, new collections for Pre-Fall 2021 were created, also taking into account the effects that Covid-19 will still have by the time the items are delivered into the stores. This refers to new ways of working, such as home office and remote work along with new travel behaviours that are likely to occur and will impact the collection creation in the future. This is what I am still working on now to influence the decision makings for the new collection creations of Fall/Winter 2021. I will keep you posted on this in the upcoming blog entry. 

// Josephina