Lindsay is the Vice President of Merchandising for Tommy Hilfiger, one of the most well-known fashion brands on the planet. As her job relies heavily on trends and knowledge, Lindsay travels the world and checks in on affiliates to see what changes should be made for upcoming seasons. From there it’s a multiple-step process involving designing, sketching, approving samples, and finally coordinating the store roll-out.
Transcript
My name is Lindsay Sword. I'm the Vice President of Merchandising at Tommy Hilfiger. I'm responsible for all of the product that we develop for North America. Merchandising is a career in which you are creating product, specifically in my case, clothing, handbags, hats, for customers. And I'm responsible for developing that product through the lens of our brand and our target customer. Each season I have to decide what clothing we want to make to sell. So my job is to look at our past sales, market trends, and the competition, what other stores, what other brands are doing, and decide what we want our design team to design for that season. I give them a road map essentially asking for them to make me shirts, pants, jackets, shorts, everything that you can think of of that you would wear, and then I work with them throughout the process as they sketch, as we get samples, and then as we decide what we want to give our sales teams to sell, we work on that development together. Then my job to edit the final collection, set it up in a show room, teach our sales teams about the collection, and then support them when they go into what we call market, which is bringing all of their accounts into our offices and our showrooms, showing them the collection, and trying to get them to buy as much as possible from us for them to sell to their customers in their stores. Each week, my team, along with the sales teams, are looking at how our product is performing in stores. We get sales reports, and we talk to those companies and stores themselves to understand the customer loves that striped polo from last month's collection, but they really don't like this t-shirt. And we'll use that information, as well as a lot of analytics and data from our different systems to understand what our customer is responding to and what they don't like. And that informs what we design and develop for the following season. We travel to around the country to our stores, to see how our product and brand is showing up to the customer. We also travel overseas for inspiration and research, to understand what's happening from a trend perspective, and also what's happening in your market segments across the globe.
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