This week I was doing some of the same work as the previous weeks, ie. putting the photos of the samples onto garments and doing some more trend research from the most recent shows.
However, something that was really exciting that we did this week was go to a sales appointment. This was my first time I had joined Julinka in a commercial meeting. The meeting was in person rather than over zoom which was also really exciting as we didn’t know whether this was going to be an option given the situation with COVID.
We took a trip into central London with the collection in the suitcase and arrived at Boohoo headquarters in Soho. There were 3 companies we were visiting that day, the first of which was Karen Millen.
I assisted Julinka with showing the samples to the Karen Millen designers. It was very interesting to see which designs caught their eyes. As we sifted through the collection they would “pull” designs out to the side. They seemed to “pull” quite a lot. We would then take them back through their “pulls” and talk a bit more about each design. Julinka took the lead with this, but I still got to take in which things stood out to the company and what they were looking for in the designs they were thinking about buying.
I was also quite struck by Julinka’s very personable approach to these meetings, she was very friendly and straight talking with the designers. It didn’t overly sound like a sales pitch and if the designers had an issue with any of the samples she would take it on the chin and not try and convince them to “get it anyway”. I could tell that the clients valued this and this approach made them feel more comfortable to discuss more openly about whether or not they could commit to buying the design.
Karen Millen ended up buying 3 designs from the collection which Julinka seemed quite happy with. We then went on to Coast where we repeated the same process. We weren’t quite as lucky with Coast. Again, they pulled a lot of designs but the head designer wasn’t there that day so they couldn’t go ahead with any purchases.
I found out that in cases like this we could create a pin board on the website with all of the “pulls” that they had. Coast’s designers would then be able to show this to their head designer online and could go ahead with a purchase in the future from the pulls. This was good for me to see the website coming into play and seeing how useful it could be for us and the clients to complete purchases without having to arrange another meeting.
The last company we were seeing was Oasis. Again, like the others they pulled quite a lot of designs and luckily the head designer Anne was there so we got a lot further in this meeting and they ended up buying 5 designs.
I really enjoyed this day and it was really interesting to find out how these types of meetings work. It was a lot less daunting than what I thought it was going to be considering how big the companies were that we were visiting. Julinka’s laid back and friendly approach to it all made me realise that perhaps it’s not all Devil wears Prada in these types of places.
