First Weeks at Björn Borg

Hi!

I have finished the second week of my internship at Björn Borg in Stockholm! I am working in the Production Department in the Souring team. The Sourcing team consists of two others who graduated from our same programme in Textile Value Chain Management at the University of Borås, so I feel really lucky to have their insight and support. Björn Borg, as a sports fashion brand, has a strong company culture in health and fitness, so many people train everyday, but on Fridays we have mandatory group training with a personal trainer! 

My experience so far consists on joining meetings with our Tier 1 suppliers in which we follow up on production, Covid restrictions and delays, confirm timeframes, and work to improve sustainability and performance. I attend meetings and webinars related to Björn Borg's sustainability strategy improving economic, environmental and social sustainability performance. I am also assisting in quality control in which we perform hands-on tests on sample products as well as evaluate quality reports coming directly from inline and final production. My individual tasks include conducting a benchmark report on the social compliancy auditor we currently use and compare the other options to see if they would like to switch providers in the future. Social compliancy auditor services allow us to monitor and improve the social performance of our vendors across the supply chain, so this includes maintaining standards such as fair wages and no child labour. The Sourcing team works directly with vendors to encourage and empower them to improve their social responsibility and environmental sustainability through incentives, education and maintaining a strong working relationship. It's been a challenging experience so far, but there is a considerable amount of overlap between what we've studied at university and what I'm doing in the workplace, so I'm very glad to have this internship opportunity. 

Hope you all are enjoying your time!

Christine

Internship blogspot - alma (1/3)

 Hey all!

I have now worked for two weeks at my internship company and the days fly by filled with new challenges and new knowledge. My job at this company is to help market a specific product, so I work with marketing. 

It contains everything from creating an information booklet about the product to hopefully eventually getting sales in the end, in any case that the company can use the information to get sales. What I have had to do so far is start to create an information booklet about the specific product. This means that I have to search and read information about it to have an understanding about the product and I have also contacted a company that today uses their product to then travel there to photograph it, to use the pictures for the information booklet. There is a wonderful group who work there and I get quick and good help when needed, which is appreciated when a new job assignment is to be carried out.

I appreciate the trust I have from the company, and the opportunity to create that kind of marketing in the way I think the product is best displayed, to create an information booklet where the goal is to send it out to all municipalities in Sweden. 

Hope you all enjoy your internship! 

alma

Internship first week

Good morning everyone!

I have been on my internship at RevolutionRace for a week now and I'm superexcited about it. For you who are unfamiliar with the RR, it is a outdoor-clothing brand located in Borås and they do operate in over 30 countries these days. Their products are only distributed through an online channel and the products are pretty much known for being of very good quality, but to a fair price. 

I work in influencer marketing department and we are a team at almost 30 people working in different markets around the world. My task will be to focus on the market in Switzerland since RR want to expand in that region. Right now I'm sitting and sourcing potential influencer that represent a certain lifestyle and the brands different communities such as, hiking-people, dog-people and the ski-community etc. Basically people who are performing any type of outdoor activity. I will source profiles this week as well so I will have a big amount of profiles, then the next step will be to establish contact and start a collaboration which will be very exciting. Switzerland is kind of unexplored territory so far, which makes it even more exciting to work with!

Anyway, it's a lot of fun, the team is increadible, very helpful and supportive and I'm really looking forward to next coming weeks at RevolutionRace!

Hope you all doing well!

Best regards, Sebastian!

First week reflection (post 1/3)

Dear Classmates,

This week was the first week of my internship at Newbody. For you who might not know, Newbody is a Swedish company that supports the swedish and finish youth association life. This is made possible as part of the sales are given back to the different associations that sell Newbody products and when purchasing online the customer can choose an association that the money will go to. The company was first in having this type of business model, which is a model many companies later have followed.

Now you all have some background regarding the company I will be spending these upcoming 10 weeks at, so I will move on to what I have been doing during this first week. As I have an internship position that is in between market and product I have the opportunity to get insight and move around at the different departments of the company and in addition to this, I will focus a lot on sustainability and participate in a sustainability project that will be connected to marketing. Therefore, this first week has been an introduction to the different departments and I have been participating in many meetings in the different departments such as marketing, inbound and product development as well as sales. This has included meetings with for example suppliers, different projects and so on. I have also been introduced to the work that the company is doing with STICA (Swedish Textile Initiative for Climate Action) and I have started to work on an external analysis of how competitors communicate sustainability on their websites. As I mentioned, there have been many meetings, and you might wonder why. Well this is because the company works with something that is called LEAN and daily stand-up meetings are a part of this strategy. Next week I will participate in a workshop about LEAN and will hopefully have more knowledge about it. 

This first week has been full of new experiences and knowledge and I look forward to seeing what the future weeks will bring!

Wish you all best of luck and I hope you are finding your internships fun and educational!

Andrea

 

The life of a research assistant (part three)

Wow, time really flies! I had almost forgotten about writing my final post with everything going on in these past few months. I hope you've all managed to dodge the Corona-bullet and are happy and healthy going in to this new semester. For me, the work at Handelslabbet has continued across the summer and renovations are nearing its end, which is super exciting! 

I’ve been a bit reluctant to inviting you all to the relaunch, as the date has been moved up som many times due to various reasons. But finally, I can officially invite you all to visit the lab, either at the relaunch this Saturday (see deets in Swedish below) or on Wednesdays between 14:00-16:00. Experience VR, learn about AI within fashion or perhaps try eye-tracking. 

I hope to see you all there!
Malin 

Sustainable Women Fashion 3/3

Hello Everyone!

I hope all of you have enjoyed your internships. This is my final blog post for the field study. During my last working weeks of internship I was very busy and had more responsibilities. So, I was doing multitasking, creating tech packs for new lines, dealing with production for our upcoming collection and working on quality assurance for new lines. Now it was summertime and we had to launch our new collection for summer, so I was working on arrangement of store for the display of new volume. I was trying to complete all the work on time. These were very busy days but full of energy and amazing experiences.

This internship was so much fun, and I gained an understanding about how the small companies run their businesses and how they launch their collections. I also learned about designing digital marketing strategy, sourcing new sustainable materials, exploring new circular ways for future, and redesigning the textile waste into garments and accessories etc. So, I have learnt a lot about different working ways of the company.

It was wonderful learning opportunity for me where I gathered new knowledge and had wonderful experiences. I hope this experience would be contributing to my future career as well.

Thanks,

Nadia.

 

Sustainable Women Fashion 2/3

Earlier I told you that I was working with sustainable women fashion brand. I have been working on multiple tasks during my intership.so, during fourth week of my internship I was working on digital marketing.

My focus during this period was to work with web shop, Facebook, and Instagram.  I worked with online selling of apparel products, and we pondered on different ways to increase online sales. I along with the team, explored new ideas for better marketing of the brand. We looked how the company’s digital marketing processes work and how can these processes be improved. It is very important for a fashion brand to keep the customer engaged through social media, being effective and comprehensible is a key here for fashion brands. It’s very valuable to publish pictures of the products. After posting picture regularly, some interesting things happened on Facebook and Instagram. Sometime immediately people gave response to the posts. In this way people get to know about upcoming volume of clothes and it was interesting to know about their opinions about the style etc. of these clothes beforehand. It is an amazing experience working with digital marketing for a fashion brand and it was a good experience to learn about e-commerce.

 I have enjoyed my time during my internship and learnt so many things about web shop and social media and I experienced the direct contact with customers. I have learnt how can company improve in these areas.

Thanks,

Nadia.

.

  

At the Handelslabbet

The renovation at the Handelslabbet is almost complete. Opening exhibition for the Retail lab has moved a bit further until October and hopefully things will settle down until then as more people would get vaccinated. There are many interesting things going on at the Handelslabbet. Technologies such as Virtual Reality devices etc. will be accessible for the people who will come to visit Handelslabbet. The posters I was working on, will soon be ready for the display at the Lab. We are looking forward to a very interesting window display for the lab, as well.

While working on my field study report, I was trying to link AI with circular economy within clothing and fashion industry and it gave me very limited number of articles. Among those, most were not even relevant. When I broadened my topic, then I was getting thousands of articles. That's when I realized how tricky systematic literature review could be.

During this whole internship period, I learned a lot. I read about and met many researchers who are working at very interesting disciplines such as applications of AI and VR in Textiles and Fashion industry.

I hope this Retail Lab will inspire students and companies to be involved in groundbreaking research areas. Hope to see most of you at the Re-opening exhibition in October.

Good luck for the new semester 😊

The Final Countdown (3/3)

Hope everyone has had amazing summer so far!  

With the last leg complete nearly complete, I'm surprised how much I've discovered about discourse analysis. It was not an easy ride but an adventurous one. Through the literature concerning the use of activist discourse, the topic that can be explored further in many ways. It has been a journey delving into discourse theory thinkers such as Foucault and Butler and being fascinated by the way they define discourse and the subject (self). So far I have gathered new skills through the coding software NVivo, which helped to organise the data and aid in my analysis. I look forward to the next stage of the course and opportunity to put what I learnt over the internships into practice. 

/N

Final Digital Marketing Update

 Hi all,

Here I am, finally writing my final blog post for the field study. My last week's in my internship have been proving very busy as I take on more responsibilities, even at the end! Though my field study project is on content marketing my role expanded beyond this so content marketing became only a small part of what I was doing. Instead, I was focusing on content marketing management, strategy, email marketing, Google ads and even some merchandising management, a real mixed bag!

I decided, in the end, to do a content analysis to determine how well the company's content fit into a content marketing framework; I began with De Plessis' 2015 content marketing framework as a basis for the coding schematic as well as my literature review on the use of core values to inform marketing strategy and used Ho et al. (2015) strategic content marketing framework to analyse the company's strategic content marketing process. In doing so I was attempting to explore how the company uses content marketing strategy to inform their content marketing creation and output and how do the core values of the brand inform the content marketing strategy. 

Many academics have outlined the need for consistent, quality content that aligns with the brand values, so while this case study did not set out to develop a new theory it did provide a rich and deep insight into how content marketing strategy works in the context of a fashion-tech start-up in its infancy.

I have enjoyed my time with this company and though I sometimes felt the breadth of work I took on was not totally relevant to my project, I did learn a lot that I believe will be useful in the next year of this master's and in my career.

Well done everyone on their field study, looking forward to the new semester already.

Slán go bhaile, Fiona Byrne