Fashion Buying in the Children's Wear sector

Executive Summary

The research report elaborates on responsibilities of Fashion buyer, who was recently appointed in a Paris based Children’s wear retail organization. The organization deals with three product lines: Children’s Wear, Swimwear and Nightwear. The introduction part of the paper discusses a little bit about the Paris fashion apparel industry and outlines three selling methods that can be used to maximize the profitability of the organization. Then, the paper goes on explaining how these three selling methods can be used and what kind of strategies to be implemented by keeping textile legislations and international currency implications in mind for each method to increase the profitability. This paper also provides an in depth information on key functional areas or key responsibility areas of fashion buyer in apparel retail sector.

As we are looking to maximize the sales of children’s wear in the first season, the paper emphasized more on what a fashion buyer should do in the first 100 days of his new post to secure maximum profitability. The paper also provided information on strategies to be used to effectively promote the children’s wear products for second season also.

Introduction

France is one of the leading countries in manufacturing high quality fabrics and fashionable apparels.  In this technology driven world, the percent of transactions happen through retail outlets have been getting down day-by-day. Nearly 35 percent of transactions happen through retail outlets where as 25 percent of transactions happen through online. With the increased awareness levels and secure payment gateways, the internet retailing industry has been reporting record levels of growth rates for past 2 to 3 years.

To maximize the revenue in the retail sector, it is mandatory to use all available options such as online retailing, physical retail outlets and mail-orders etc. As our retail outlet is offering children’s wear, swimwear and nightwear, the online retailing will help us to boost the sales. Since, most of the customers do not much bother about the highly trendy models in any of our product lines, customers prefer online retailing. Moreover, customers prefer to pay over online low-cost items. When compared to fashionable items like party wear, business wear and travel wear, the price of our children’s wear is much lesser. So, the possibility of online transactions is very high for products like nightwear and children’s wear.

The most important things to be considered, while implementing growth strategies, are textile legislations in France and implications of international currency at the time of exporting or importing goods. According to France legislation, the textile manufacturing companies and textile retailers should follow specific rules while implementing growth strategies. Considering legislations regarding environment, health & safety, labeling and national standards is very important while deriving the strategies. For instance, the label on the garment should include the information about the percentages of fabric or cotton used in France. Likewise, different counties will have different regulations on labeling the garment. So, fashion buyers should also aware of the textile legislation while interacting with suppliers to create customer-centric business environment. Considering international currency implications such as exchange rate volatility and bilateral exchange rate is also important. The volatility of the exchange rates would impact the businesses while importing or exporting the goods to other countries.

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Source: Children’s Fashion Europe (2012)

Online Sales Method to Increase Profitability

Internet has become a major part of daily life for most of the people in developed and developing countries. With increasing awareness of e-commerce and secure payment gateways, online transactions have increased to an extent wherein people are depending internet to purchase any small item (Miller, 2002). Apparel business is one among the best e-commerce businesses in the world. In fact, most of the top apparel companies purely depend on the online sales to increase the profitability. Online sales always carry good margins on products.

As a fashion buyer at the outset, I would like to carry out the website analytics to know traffic flows, unique visitors, broken links, site navigation issues, security issues and content issues (Plaza, 2009). The web analytics would definitely help in getting deeper understanding on the online sales percentage out of total sales of the organization. This also helps me to understand from which geography, more number of hits coming to the website. Depends on the number of hits from particular region, I can implement different strategies for different locations. My first task towards online sales strategy is providing right and easy navigations. As we offer three products; nightwear, swimwear and character children-wear, it is important to provide easy navigations that help customers can directly go to desired product.

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