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

Hello everyone,

It is time for another Update about my Product Management Internship!

While we watch companies and whole countries responding in various ways to crises, many people wonder what is depends on when conquering those challenges successfully. 

On the one hand, crises may include smaller challenges for manufacturing industries if, for example, a customer demands adaption or the company wishes to revive relationships with high-volume wholesalers. On the other hand, bigger scale challenges such as Covid-19 may occur, in which fast response and most commonly production adaptions play a crucial role. 

 

As of my experience, the successful mastering not only comes down to efficient and effective management but is often grounded on other level decisions, just like sophisticated product management practices.

Meaning, in the meanwhile, the Covid-19 crises has impacted my internship company as well, wherefore fast actions were required by the CEO of my internship company. As for now, I have been busy working on analyses for the upcoming collections in 2021 with regard to the styles and fabrics that were meant to be produced. The Pre-Spring and Spring/Summer 2021 collection volumes had to be reduced by about 30%, still achieving the minimum margins. Therefore, by means of analyses, I was able to reveal products with low margins and based on that my supervisors either adjusted the costs of goods sold, or the retail prices; if not eliminating the product completely.

Overall, the changes mainly lie within the Pre-Sales Phase of the luxury fashion products because afterwards everything is in production already and cannot be stopped anymore, it has to be sold in the stores anyway. What is more, the suppliers’ circumstances were never left aside, and the company was striving to not cancel too many orders, but rather postpone them for the upcoming collection release.

Retrospective, having a very good established product management system with skilled workers who take major decisions is key; containing of ongoing analyses that are supported by sophisticated workflows is essential to endure an efficient risk management as a whole company in times of crises. At this fashion company agility was essential for this to provide a more flexible workflow. Thus, the strategy and roadmaps can be adapted more easily according to management decisions and customer inquiries. 

 

Beyond these issues, in times like these, company’s general weak points are identified. We realised that digitalization of collection material was our extensive problem. Up to 2020 all collection handovers and the sales phase activities afterwards were hold as very big sales events in the different showrooms of the company all over the world. Thus, all collections were shown physically, having samples set up in the locations and the salespeople came to understand the new/adapted styles, touch the fabrics and experience the feel of the products. However, with restricted travel possibilities, these physical events were cancelled, wherefore all products have to be digitalized now. For some product groups digital showrooms are established already, but unfortunately not for ours yet. This depicts a major challenge. Accordingly, I have been working on visualizing the products lately and setting up presentations precisely so that the retailers and key account manager will be able to understand the new collections for 2021 coherently and somehow imagine the fit, feel and texture of the styles. The success of the implementation definitely also depends on the product group since, for example, polo shirt styles can more easily be constituted digitally. Whereas suits have more complex constructions anyway and its fabrics are in most cases very hard to display digitally. In the latter case, the salespeople need way better know-how about the fabrics and imagination while they are also much pickier due to the higher prices of suits in comparison to, for example, polo shirts. 

 

Yet, the departments’ proactive behaviour in previous months and coherent understanding of their products and processes emerge to have definitely helped my team itself with achieving the requirements set up by the board in the twinkling of an eye. As for now, our actions contributed decisively to the company’s successful crisis management. 

 

 

// Josephina