Philippine Fashion

Just got home from another busy Philippine Fashion Week, I find this year's event level up to new breakthroughs in the Philippine Fashion and designs.  Old and new designers emerged with more and more creative works than ever before.

Compared to New York, Paris and Milan Fashion weeks, definitely theres a long way to go but with consistency and innovation, I am certain the Filipino designers can be at par with international creative fashion.

As a retail merchandising manager myself, I place top quality in the works of my vendors and here in this event, I can see many potential future suppliers that can make big names and bucks in the store racks.  Though in my many years, I rarely see these fashion designers take the opportunity to enter the mainstream retail since most of them being creative as they are wants to preserve their independence and would want to focus mainly on their couture works.

Even if the big bucks remain in having their works become part of the mainstream retail for the mass consumers, they tend to cocoon and thrive in mainly targeting custom-made clientele.  For me one would be their limited understanding of how big the potential of their works becoming part of a bigger platform rather than producing one dress at a time.  Secondly, most of these young and old designers have very limited resources to expand their works to enter mainstream retailers, they must be backed by financial backers inorder for them to take the bigger stage of massively producing for the bigger consumers of retailers.

Lastly, I supposed there have been perception that when these fashion designers mass produced for major retailers, they have to take the loss of non-saleability of their clothesline if their merchandise perform dismally in a given fashion season.  For me this can be a two-edge sword.  For one, merchandise are saleable if truly they can come up with designs that hits through the core of what the consumer needs, secondly, its not right to say, retailers have this heartless way of returning unsold goods after a period of time since these can be negotiated with other means to compensate a win-win for both retailers and fashion designers.

I wish to one day see the works of these very hard-working and creative designers be in most retail racks and that there will be a collaborative work in enhancing each of their potentials of improving the retail landscape. 

Merchandising & Stock Replenishment

Merchandising and stocking are essential tasks in virtually any retail business. Effective merchandising techniques prevent a haphazard arrangement of goods that can hinder sales, while efficient stocking procedures ensure the merchandise is always available for customer purchase. While the merchandising and stocking functions are closely related, there are also some key differences between the two.

Merchandising Identification

Merchandising is a retail marketing process entailing the visual displaying of goods as well as product selection. Merchandising involves determining the proper product mix for the store, the shelf position of each item and creating and building attractive displays and signage. Merchandising also includes the creation of special promotions and pricing. When done effectively, merchandising serves as a type of "silent salesperson," as it draws customers to merchandise and displays, often leading to purchases.

Stocking Identification

Stocking is the process of filling the store's shelves and displays with merchandise for sale, commonly referred to as "stock." Stocking can also refer to the process of replenishing and storing goods in the store's backroom or warehouse. Store employees known as stock clerks are responsible for keeping the shelves full in their particular departments and reordering merchandise when supplies run low. In larger retail establishments, stock replenishment occurs with the aid of an automated inventory management system.

Relationship

Store management's merchandising policies and practices largely determine the stocking needs of a retail establishment. For example, in a clothing store, if management decides to run a sale on a new line of summer fashions along with creating a special display, store personnel will likely need to order extra merchandise and ensure the display remains fully stocked during the promotional period. If grocery store management decides to carry a new product, stockers need to place the item in the appropriate shelf location.

Job Duties

From an employment perspective, stocking duties are more physical in nature while the merchandising role requires more analytical and creative abilities. Stockers spend much of their time transporting and lifting merchandise while in the process of filling shelves and building displays. The merchandising role requires the analysis of sales data and trends, such as when determining what items to carry or to put on sale. Creative ability is helpful for thinking of innovative and profitable ways to display products.

Reviving a new love

English: Camera Nikon D5000 and KIT Photographic Lens. Français : Un appareil photo Nikon D5000 et son objectif d'origine. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yes, I love and will always love this..

But don't get overly excited, I'm not talking about the platonic kind of love.  What I meant is I have this new fondness for taking photographs once again, that I recently bought a new Nikon D5000 SLR.

Oh yes, taking those shots makes me want to capture every glimpse of every morning sunrise and the setting of the sun.  To immortalize a scene in the form of visuals.  A cataclysmic way of doing something momentous in such an agonizingly boring life of mine.

Unfortunately, the last time I held a camera was back when I was in High School, when I used to be the photography editor for the school newspaper and gets to participate and win in the regional and national press conferences, Looking back then and now, the evolution of capturing through the camera lens has truly made a dramatic breakthrough all these years and the recent announcement that Kodak films will soon be out of sync with the fast changing times has caught my awareness once more.

Needless to say, I am trying to enroll for a crash course in basic digital photography and natural photo editing and wish me the best of luck as I learn something new with this new desire in understanding the basics of digital image capture.

Soon will share those shots and may those captured moments tell a whole new story of my life and the surroundings I'm traversing each day.

Merchandising Operation

As a merchandising company, you can divide your activities into separate operations and determine how efficiently each one carries out its work. Your company buys products, places them into storage and sells them again for a profit. Each of the merchandising functions required for this process operates as a separate unit. These merchandising operations represent the steps required for the company to carry out the merchandising business and coordinate its functions.

Purchase

Purchasing your merchandise involves identifying suppliers who can meet your price and quality targets, ordering the appropriate quantity, arranging for shipment to your warehouse, receiving and inspecting the merchandise and placing it into inventory. This part of your operations generates the largest part of your costs, making cost control of purchased merchandise a key factor in the profitability of your merchandising company.

Inventory

A merchandising business has to manage inventory to make sure the merchandise stays in good condition and to track goods so they are available when they are to be sold. Inventory can be perpetual, which is a control method that tracks merchandise purchased and sold in a continuous fashion, or it can operate cyclically, with inventory taken periodically and costs calculated and assigned at the end of each period. In either case, inventory operation requires the merchandiser to decide how much inventory to carry, where to store it and how to optimize use of available space.

Sales

The sales operation of your merchandising company determines the sales strategy and the product mix. The sales department considers the expected demand, the actions of competitors, the promotional strategy, the image to be presented and the features sales personnel can use to sell the products. When the sales department operates effectively, the company has inventory corresponding to the projected sales and achieves those sales, generating the expected profit.

Presentation

While the sales department develops the overall sales strategy, a merchandising company often has a separate operation in charge of the retail presentation of the products. For fashion retailers, for example, the in-store arrangement of manikins, clothing, promotional material and displays is important. This part of the merchandising operation executes the sales strategy in a creative way to attract customers and encourage them to purchase the offered merchandise.

Administration

The three parts of a merchandising business that determine profitability are the purchasing function, which generates the costs of goods; the sales function, which produces revenue; and administration, which is the overhead. Since your profit is revenue minus cost of sales and overhead, profitability increases when you increase sales but keep overhead increases low. Controlling overhead costs while implementing a sales strategy to increase revenue is an effective method of raising profitability for merchandising companies.

Merchandising and Business Management

Business management and merchandising are very different business processes. Business management involves leadership of a company or department, which includes employee supervision, strategic planning, organization and decision-making. Merchandising involves all of the steps in the process of acquiring products from a supplier and delivering them to your customer.

Business Management Basics

Business management provides vision and direction to an organization. Managers have higher-level responsibility for business success than other front-line employees. Managers must typically have the ability to communicate strategy and decisions and feedback on employee performance. Managers also hire and train employees and have oversight of employee morale in the workplace. Some managers also have responsibilities for monitoring and accounting for performance of the employees who work for them.

Merchandising Basics

To effectively persuade customers to buy your products in a store, you have to merchandise them. This means setting them up to attract attention and displaying them attractively in the store. Merchandise directors and specialists usually oversee the merchandising process, which has significant influence in the success of retailers in turning over inventory. Merchandise requires good strategy, as most stores carry many products and must decide where to place all products to optimize overall sales performance.

Merchandiser

Merchandise directors, specialists or just merchandisers are the employees typically responsible for merchandise management. Merchandisers usually coordinate with company design teams to develop plan-o-grams that lay out the products in an aesthetically pleasing way. Merchandisers usually need good communication and negotiation skills to provide leadership on visual design and floor planning processes. Merchandisers also need creativity and innovation to proactively design effective floor plans and to respond to poor performing merchandise.

Managers to Merchandisers

Merchandise directors often participate in company management teams with leaders of other functional departments. They may coordinate with vice presidents or executives in the company's buying department to coordinate the entire process of buying products, merchandising it, selling it and replenishing it. Company buying managers need to be on the same page with merchandisers to have a well-planned and coordinated product merchandising effort that results in strong sales performance.

Marketing and Category Management

When I was offered to lead a team of a newly formed department called Category Management in a beauty and health retailer in 2010, I was given a briefing by the Vice President for Human Resources as to the scope of the job, as it is their first time to have these division in their corporate structure, they would want to initially merge it with their marketing department.

It took me more than two weeks to finally came up with the written and approved job scope of their category division, nonetheless, it is still a merchandising related job however there were several additional scope in the job that pertains to marketing and branding.

So here, I am sharing what that responsibility means and how it has developed me further in my retail dynamic skills and experience which I find very valuable.

Category Management

is a collaborative continuous process between manufacturers and retailers to manage a shopper need state which we refer to as a ‘category’. The purpose of this process is to optimize shopper satisfaction and fulfill the role chosen by the retailer for that category within the overall portfolio of categories in the retail format. The end state of the category management process is that combination of assortment, price, shelf presentation and promotion which optimizes the category role over time.

Category management is data intensive and analytical in character. Category management is about understanding data. By contrast, shopper marketing is more about understanding emotions or motivations.

Most importantly the category serves as the platform from which shopper marketing  initiatives can be collaboratively launched because the retailer and the manufacturers ideally are aligned around a common solution to a need state of the shopper. Large complex consumer need states such as a ‘family dining‘ solution or a ‘birthday party‘ solution often involve a multi-category solution which necessitates the collaboration of multiple manufacturers and the retailer.

Marketing

is an effort to change attitudes and thereby change behaviors. Marketing has many requirements. It must create awareness, stimulate desire and ultimately differentiate the product by giving consumers a reason to purchase in preference to competition. Marketing is a continuous and all-encompassing activity. It is not a single campaign or initiative such as event marketing, a social media program or an in store shopper marketing event. These are components of the larger multi-faceted activity known as marketing.

Marketers have many tools to attain their objectives. These include research protocols and various promotional and communication options ranging from print to TV to all the newer social and digital media.  Marketing begins by understanding consumer attitudes towards a particular need and then proceeds to product design and strategy development. Great marketing is built upon an insight, a profound understanding of some critical aspect of the consumer need. Marketing consummates at two moments of truth, the first at the shelf when the product is purchased and the second when the product is consumed.

The ultimate end of marketing is creating equity in the consumer’s mind such that consumers identify that product as uniquely theirs, a trusted contributor to a more satisfying life, one that meets a perceived need in a superior manner.

Shopper Marketing

For the CPG manufacturer, shopper marketing is an occasion based component of the larger marketing armamentarium.  It is preceded by the shopper’s perception of a need state and possibly by previous experience with other products in the category which satisfy the need. Shopper marketing is  preceded by and influenced by all the advertising and information collected from months perhaps years of advertising exposure and in many cases actual usage experience.  The objective of shopper marketing is the enhancement of the brand’s equity at the point of sale. Such that a purchase occurs.

 The initiative called ‘shopper marketing’ begins as the consumer perceives a need and starts down the path to purchase perhaps by taking the mundane first step of preparing the shopping list. Shopper marketing may include a range of information gathering and communication interactions including seeking and receiving promotional incentives or exploring websites for product recommendation or product availability. 

The key point is that shopper marketing is an episodic  time bound activity, occasion specific and immediately linked to a transaction consummated at retail at the end of the path to purchase.  

The larger and more comprehensive ecosystem of marketing surrounds and influences the more immediate transactional activity known as shopper marketing.  What differentiates shopper marketing is its inextricable link to the retail point of purchase. Therefore truly effective shopper marketing requires some level of collaboration with the retailer who, after all, controls the point of sale. Let’s put it this way: the single most effective and efficient ‘shopper marketing’ tool is a display at retail. Can any manufacturer get display without the retailer’s collaboration? This basic fact requires the manufacturer to align with retailers who understandably have their own objectives regarding the shoppers and the need states involved in any given shopper marketing initiative.

For the retailer, shopper marketing is a more important component of the overall marketing activity because the   ‘product‘ the retailer is selling is the shopper experience. That experience has as its objective satisfying the need states which the drive the shopper to the store or digital shopping location. Many important aspects of that shopping experience are not time bound. For example, store appearance, in store service level, pricing and promotional policies etc. are permanent, continuous components of and contributors to the shopping experience and the overall marketing platform of the retailer.

But many important aspects of the retailer’s overall marketing platform are occasion specific or target shopper specific.  

These overlap with and often align with the manufacturer’s ‘shopper marketing’ initiatives. These are initiatives aimed at a specific shopper need state that add excitement and urgency to the shopping experience. In these cases, shopper marketing for the retailer centers on categories which themselves are satisfiers of shopper’s needs. The brands within the category are competing to satisfy the basic shopper need. The retailer is agnostic to the brand except in so far as one brand somehow does a superior job in meeting the shopper need.  For the retailer, shopper marketing is about categories and needs not brands and their initiatives.

The retailer has the same weaponry as the manufacturer with which to influence the shopper but has two unique weapons unavailable to the manufacturer.  Through its proprietary loyalty card data, the retailer knows every aspect of the shopper’s buying behavior in the store. Even more importantly, the retailer controls one critical moment of truth, the  point of purchase itself, the shelf, the alter of  the shopper experience. Without the retailer’s collaboration, the manufacturer is virtually powerless at the shelf. 

Therefore the manufacturer’s capability to succeed at shopper marketing requires aligning with the need states or categories chosen by the retailer to attract and satisfy the shopper.