In my first role out of university, I was able to negotiate a car into my compensation package.
It was a design job outside of London. It was a Renault Mégane and a manual transmission…that I didn’t know how to drive. But I learned, stalling more times than I can count on Hyde Park Corner’s roundabout.
Nonetheless, I am an expert in driving both automatics and manual cars.
Another part of learning to drive is to occasionally peek in the rearview mirror as you drive. Scanning the road as you proceed forward, changing lanes, or need to suddenly hit the brakes.
And, as I explained in my interview on the Mere Merchants podcast (being released around Xmas time), merchants should also occasionally be looking in a rearview mirror of their own.
As merchants, we’re trained to focus on “the buy.”
I mean duh, of course we are. It’s the crux of the role, and everything we do rolls up into it.
We also obsess over the downstream impact of our product decisions: the shop floor, the customer, what happens next. But when we look only in that direction, we lose sight of the upstream impact of those same decisions.
We rarely glance in the rearview mirror.
As a merchant, when would I ever need to visit a garment factory or textile mill? I was too busy working on the next season’s buy, visiting stores across regions, and training teams to ensure the merchandising strategy landed correctly on the shop floor. I was also pulling sales data from EDI printouts to prep for market appointments.
In the Paris or Munich showroom, the goal was simple: keep the retail buyer happy and changes to a minimum. And yet I can recall plenty of moments where we added or cancelled styles and made promises to department stores for color tweaks, print changes, style adjustments and the like.
At the end of market, I’d go back to my global merch team, hat in hand, and ask them to make it happen. I thought they were straightforward requests. And most of the time, I got what I wanted.
And I never looked in the rearview mirror. I didn’t have to.
Visiting a mill, factory, or vendor wasn’t part of the job. I wasn’t exposed to the domino effect of my decisions or the chaos they created upstream. Once the assortment was locked, there were rarely consequences for late changes because our view was forward facing.
Looking back with a new perspective, I can appreciate what those decisions set in motion.
Consider a color change:
If global merchandising approves it, a color swap triggers product development and sourcing to notify vendors, revise the BOM, and pause production.
- Materials then has to create the new color and get design approval.
- The BOM, tech pack, and vendor PO are updated to reflect the change.
- A new proto is made and routed back to design and global merchandising for approval.
- Item numbers, purchase orders, and hangtags all need updates.
- Deliveries slip because of the rework.
- We lose valuable selling time.
It gets even more complicated if an entire new style is added that didn’t exist, in a new color, with a new print and a new trim!
The cost of a change can be monumental, both upstream and downstream.
Meanwhile, the fashion industry has issues with chronic overdevelopment and excess inventory.
Are merchants necessarily aware of how our decisions specifically contribute to those issues?
I doubt it.
There’s a lot of debate about the future of merchandising: is it more art or science, and how will AI reshape the discipline?
I believe merchandising has three fundamental issues to address:
1 – What’s our right balance of “high tech/high touch”? AI isn’t here to replace human judgment. If anything, as technology advances, we need more of it, not less.
2 – Do we truly understand the upstream impact of our product decisions, not just the downstream? If we did, we might choose differently.
3 – Given the two questions above, what should the education of the next generation of merchants look like?
Because I’d argue what we rely on today is becoming obsolete, fast.
