Retail Merchandising from personal experience Презентация составлена Куликовой Татьяной Владимировной (СПО «Златоустовский торгово-экономический техникум») myenglishsite.ru

commodity expert – специалист по товароведению; goods manager / expert on merchandise / merchandiser – товаровед “If you want a career in retail, it all begins on the shop floor,” says Tania Shepherd, Assistant Merchandiser at Debenhams. Read the interview and say what you think about each answer.

What does a merchandiser do? Our role is to plan trading strategies. We work closely with each store and work out what items to send them depending on their fixtures and fittings. We also work closely with the buyers so that when we do sales forecasts we can let them know what items we will need and when. Lastly we work closely with the finance department at sales time to let them know what items we want to reduce and at what discount.

Sounds busy – I bet Christmas must be chaotic? I work in the homes department, so a lot of our items, such as picture frames, are bought as Christmas gifts. We certainly have more stock coming in at Christmas time because that is when sales are the highest. But a lot of the hard work is done beforehand as we tend to start planning 12-18 months in advance, and most Christmas items have a three month lead time as a lot of things are made in the Far East.

Describe a typical day We spend Monday analysing the sales from the week before, looking at how the department performed, how the product performed, analysing whether we have enough stock left in store. We also analyse re-buys which means looking at 30 lines in detail each week and forecasting how many more we might need and then doing the orders. We always have store queries and cost issues to deal with, and we often go and visit stores to see how much space they have and what their fixtures are like, so we can plan what items to send them. For example, we couldn’t send six large mirrors to a store with little space and expect them to display them!

What do you enjoy about your job? I like the variety – it can be a completely mad environment but it’s exciting. Management can suddenly fling something on you and you have to react – at the moment we are doing a mid- season promotion and we’ve had to come up with something that’s going to generate cash without giving away the stock. Everything we do has an impact – I enjoy the challenge of reacting to how our department is performing on a day to day basis and seeing sales increase as a result.

What qualities do you need for a career in merchandising? It helps to be organised and also to have numerical ability because we work a lot with numbers, for example, when forecasting and analysing sales. An interest in your product also helps.

What is the career structure like? You start off as an allocator where you are responsible for sending stock out to stores and making sure all the stores are happy. You then progress to assistant merchandiser, where you do a lot of the ground work; from there you become a junior merchandiser where you are responsible for planning and strategy and you manage a small team, and then to merchandiser where you are the overall manager of the team.

What advice do you have for anyone wanting a career in merchandising? You should have an awareness of retail and try to get some experience on the shop floor. I started my career in banking but decided I wanted a career that used my interior design qualifications. I got some shop floor experience, and applied to various department stores – my background in banking helped because it showed I could work with numbers but my experience of working on the shop floor was invaluable.