James
My name’s James and I work in lingerie in Marks & Spencer, in Merchandising.
They had three different areas I wanted to go into; Menswear, Homeware, and Lingerie and I was picked to go in Lingerie. What that says about me, I don’t know!
Merchandising is, generally speaking, trying to buy the right amount of stock, to maximise the sales and to minimise any risk . That’s the general essence of Merchandising.
I specialise in the Shapewear section, so all the bits that hold people in. Smooth those wrinkles out! Keep you looking ship-shape! It’s quite a specialist department so there are lots of areas within it to try and cover all the niche markets. Some of our slips for example, have thirty different sizes, so to try and keep all of those in stock for everybody and keep everyone happy, it’s quite a challenge.
Busiest day in a merchandiser’s world is a Monday. I come in on a Monday, early morning, 7 o’clock, go through the sales, and see what happened the last week. So Monday is by far the busiest day and it’s all about monitoring the sales, looking at the trends. So, when I come to store, I want to see that we’ve got every size available for the customer and see what sizes are selling. I think the biggest thing I’ve learnt about retail, and Shapewear specifically is that I didn’t understand how much Shapewear the UK needs! To be honest, I didn’t know you could take so much money ‘shaping Britain!’
I was conscious that, working for M&S, you’ll be taken care of. You’re almost like part of a family, and a big family. And I knew they would invest in me. The training has been pretty extensive. You start in different areas of the company and when I joined, I was given a ‘buddy’ to train me in the allocation area; and then once I’d started doing that, they have a Business Foundation Course. So on top of the general on-the-job training, there are also other course such as management training and leadership that they’ve obviously invested a fair bit of money and resources in.
If I wanted to work for a retailer, it was going to be M&S, because they were the biggest, they were the market leader, and I trusted the brand. I worked for other companies before, and I always walked past Marks & Spencer, looked in the window and would think, I want to work for them.
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