First weeks

Hi!

I started my internship 2 weeks ago, so a little later than everyone else J. I am now working at a menswear company based in Gothenburg. It´s a small/medium sized company, which means that I am able to see how the whole company works and what is everyone´s role in making the business a success! Though being small in the number of employees, they are presented in over 20 countries worldwide.

I am mainly working on my own project and if necessary helping everyone with other tasks.  So far I have collected and analyzed all the information of their AW16 collection and current sustainability practices in order to evaluate the sustainability and transparency in their supply chain. Later on I will also work with the creative director to go over the materials and suppliers they use. I will also work with the art director to improve their website in terms of communication with their customers about their sustainability practices.

So far it has been fun but quite challenging at the same time since I have been mostly working alone. Can´t wait to see what the next weeks will bring!

Week 1-3

Hello everyone! 

I´m interning at Junkyard AB (www.junkyard.se), which is an online company that sell shoes, clothes and accessories. They have three key words that they follow, which are street, sports and fashion. I´m at their office located in Gothenburg and I’m interning as an assistant buyer where I work with their three internal brands.


The first three weeks have been interesting and I feel like I have got more of an insight in what a buyer does. My ambitions for the first three weeks were to increase my understanding in what a daily task is for a buyer, and I have! I´ve learned how their buying program works, how to talk to suppliers, order handling and much more. I have also worked with inquires and learned how that works. Also, I have been to their office in Trollhättan and worked with a few pair of jeans. In the end of the third week, I made a competitive analysis where I looked at prices, products and campaigns of competitors here in Gothenburg.

The fourth week is here and I’m in the process of planning my report while interning full time. I’m finding it hard to come up with a theory because I’m not sure what to write about and because of the lack of time.  Although I feel stressed, it’s a lot of fun and I’m excited to learn more!  

Best regards,
Lina Forsman 

First weeks at MASKA

Hey all!

I am doing my internship at Maska, Gothenburg based clothing company that offers both knit and woven garments. Maska emphasizes a lot on the quality of the yarn, fabric and the production with selecting all their suppliers and producers carefully and keeping sustainability in mind, while offering affordable products.

Officially I am buyer’s assistant intern. My tasks vary from changing/developing sketches, adding information to the product data management system, measuring and commenting samples, communicating with the suppliers, putting together care labels information to working on the online store system, searching for mailing bag suppliers and designing material for pop-up store.

The company is small, but i would say, mighty. Maska has 63 stockist in 14 countries and they emphasise on their online store. At the office, there are two full time employees of whom one is the founder of the company. But there are also many freelancers involved in the work.

So every day there is something new happening and I love that I am being involved to all the processes from designing to planning, photoshooting and calculating. It gives me an ability to learn a lot and also gives a very good overlook on how one small company works and grows.

Once you get started

I know that the title may sound as a rather flamboyant song by Gavin Christopher, but it somehow reminds me of a fresh starts which happened in my life over the years. Last month happened incredibly fast. I started my internship a bit earlier, in the beginning of March, which gave me a bit more time to think and adapt to the new environment. Before this, I have never been on an actual internship, so my excitement during the first week at Pauline van Dongen studio was obvious.

Pauline van Dongen is a fashion designer and smart textiles innovator, working in the area of wearable technology. She established her studio straight after graduation 6 years ago and over the time, her work has developed to the new levels but still carrying her apparent signature. As a Digital Communication and Marketing intern in this rather small Dutch studio, I got an opportunity to work closely with each member of our team. Even though I did not pick a biggest company of all, the mere feeling that I, a Slovak girl, studying in Sweden and working closely with 4 different nationalities in The Netherlands made me realised, how cosmopolitan even a smaller place can feel.

Alongside others, few of my tasks include creating and planing marketing content and press material for each of our latest projects, supporting the set up at exhibitions and photo shoots, communication with partners, press and art institutions and creating visual documentation and notes about design processes happening in the studio. I always knew that with work comes also a great responsibility. During my second week, I have already experienced how it feels to be in charge of a set up for a fashion garments exhibition, which needs to visually trigger people but also be accessible for a wider audience.

As for now, I am currently working on a mood boards for our next fashion photo shoot and approaching the potential photographers at the same time. I have a strong feeling that it is going to be even more exciting that what I have experienced so far. Netherlands is a beautiful country full of opportunities and I can feel that we share the same level of aesthetics with my colleagues. It feels like to be a part of a big creative family without any limitation in ideas, designs or used materials. Everybody is a strong independent personality, working hard to make the future of fashion smarter and more sustainable.

My notes from the days in the studio are getting thicker and thicker so stay tuned for the next update from a land of stroopwafels and appelflappen!

First weeks

Hi!

I’m doing my internship as an Assistant Buyer at Lindex headquarters, which is located in Gothenburg. I’m working at kids department and I’m helping with the following product segments: boys’ tricot and both girls’ and boys’ underwear, nightwear and swimwear. Even though I started my internship two weeks ago, I have already learned a lot. I have worked within the textile industry before but purchasing is a totally new thing to me and it’s very interesting to see how the process works from an idea to an actual product.

I’m mostly working with order handling and samples. It’s nice to notice that I’m doing the same job as an actual Assistant Buyer so I can really see how the process works. When it comes to working with samples, I have made quality tests for them and also commented what is okay and what should be changed. Because Lindex’s products are manufactured in Turkey, China, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, I’m also working with people around the world. It has been interesting to see what the differences are if I’m working with Lindex’s own production offices or Lindex’s direct suppliers.

I’m enjoying my time here at Lindex and I’m eagerly looking forward to see what I will learn during this internship! 

First weeks of the Internship

Post 1, Nina Brodin

Last week I started my Internship at a small marketing & licensing agency in Valencia, a city located by the sea in the east of Spain. It is a very beautiful city and the company I am working for has their office in the middle of the center among the shopping streets, with the big shopping center El Corte Inglés as its neighbour. During my first day I had a meeting with the boss to talk about their projects and how I can be of help, and he told me that they were expecting me to come with suggestions on how they can improve their work and it made me super nervous. How could I, as a student with close to no experience, come up with new ideas to someone who has 20 years experience of the industry? 

Anyway, the company is working with different projects and we decided that I will start working with one project to begin with. They are working with a fashion brand that wants to develop their use of social media as a marketing tool and I have found it very interesting so far. And believe it or not, I had a few ideas about how it could be done that I presented to my boss, the marketing manager and the creative director in the end of last week. And they decided to go on with my ideas which of course feels great! I guess I have to thank all the teachers who made us come up with new ideas fast during the lectures 

first week at KILIAN KERNER | Berlin

I have survived the first days of my internship and my feelings can be described as;

amazing – happy – relieving – special – confusing – weird – strange

…but what has happened so far…

Finally, I got my shit together and moved to Berlin, my new fashion capital of Europe. It’s all about dressing up and how to impress others from your own look and style. So, I have decided...what else could it be…wearing THE Swedish color – black. Blackly dressed, I was quite nervous when I was standing in front of the entrance of the atelier of KILIAN KERNER, my workplace for the next three months. A lot of things went through my mind. Are they going to like me, am I going to like it, like the team…state of panic…sweating…but I have told myself. Keep calm and enjoy...you could have ended up way worse by staying in Borås…come on it’s fucking Berlin, it has to be going good anyway!

The first week is over…time flies so fast and I even can’t remember what exactly happened every single day, because there are too many impressions I've got it’s hard to remember all the details. As a production and sampling intern I have to work with the fabrics and yarns first hand. Below are some tasks listed.

•         Get to know my team, my colleagues and my workplace
•         Get to know my tasks and workload
•        Study current collection / previous collection
•        Doing inventory; measure fabrics and sort the storage 
•         Contact and negotiate with suppliers

Due to the many impressions I’ve got during the last days I’m struggling with the topic of my final report. What the hell should I chose?! Either I’m going to write about the internal communication between the different departments within the value chain of a company, the supplier as the pixies of a collection, or about the opportunities of textile recycling (fabrics and yarns…not clothing). But since I had a lot of sustainable topics within the last courses...I’m not sure about that. I’ll try to choose the right topic at the end of week two.

…to be continued…

XOXO Mate

First impressions

I started my internship at Elvine in Gothenburg on the 29th of March 2016. Elvine is a Swedish clothing brand established in 2001 and they're best known for designing jackets. Elvine's aim is to capture the urban lifestyle and produce clothes that transcend seasons and are easy to wear and combine with different garments.

I'm working at the marketing department and mostly with visual merchandising, marketing and graphical design. Over the past two weeks I've been helping the graphical designer with preparing images for Instagram, creating newsletters and company's PowerPoint presentations as well as attending weekly marketing and general meetings. Also, I attended the proto meeting that is held twice a year, where designers introduce garments for the next season to the employees of the brand. In addition to my everyday work tasks, my supervisor gave me two individual tasks that require work over a longer period of time.

My first project is to analyse the social media landscape - introduce different social media channels, come up with other social media platforms that Elvine could use and present a plan, how to improve the content of the existing channels. Another, more time-consuming project is to present fresh ideas for visual merchandising, both for the shop-in-shops and flagship store. They want me to come up with a plan, how to place products at the stores as well as make an illustrative sketch for the layout and design of the stores. I will present my first ideas and work results at the next marketing meeting and hopefully get feedback on how to continue my work.

My supervisor has many great job tasks planned for me, so I'm looking forward to it and hopefully I'll get a chance to attend production meetings as well and get to know the buyer's work.

Hello all,

If been here for some months now and it is kind of hard to decide what to write about, especially when you are working for a company who has an intricate supply chain. The variety of people create a web of communication, where sometime is hard to create a clear image of how the company works.

Here you can really see an example of how information can get lost when too many people are involved. Maybe it would be interesting to write about how communication plays an important role in the supply change, and how inefficient communication systems can destroy a company. 

In my case, our department not only handles communication with all the parts in the supply chain, but has constant communication and import from external partners (who hold special licenses without products). Not having good communication with all the license partners can create whole product halts or fines.

If you have any tips on the subject, they are welcome!

Hope you have a great day!

                                                                                                                                                                   20/06/2015 - Blog Post 1

Product Management Internship at Puma

Hello everyone,

Finally my internship has started and after all the complications due to immigration and work permits I am finally in Germany! ;) Temporarily living in Erlangen, I have got loads of information to digest. It is incredible to get a glimpse of how the supply chain works in real life and all the parts that are interconnected, communication is important and information is king. My internship is mainly assisting Product Manager in their daily tasks and duties, which are a list full of responsibilities ranging from the creative process to mundane activities such as sending packages.

During my first week I have met people from all over the world, different cultures, adding to that the difference in culture between Germany and Sweden. You never really think of it but it is amazing how different a country can be when they are so close to each other.

Looking forward to the following months!

Good luck to you all wherever you are!