Day 2: Children's Apparel Buying Office

My day began around 9:00 when I was taken to the Children's Apparel buying office. My mentor for today was Nancy. She buys all the boys clothing, 0-2 year old clothing, gifts for children, strollers, and toys for Neiman Marcus. When I walked in everyone in that buying office was celebrating because they got merchant of the month. Merchant of the month is when a buying office exceeds their goal and has a high increase in sales. The Children's buying office had a huge increase in sale because they released a new Bugaboo stroller that can convert to two strollers and back into one and is extremely light weight but it costs $16000.00. It has been selling extremely well and they were completely sold out within the first week so people are on waiting lists for this limited edition stroller. Nancy treated us to Starbucks and then as soon as we got back I attended a meeting with the assistant buyers on Imports. This meeting was about foreign vs. landed vendors. We talked about the following in the meeting: shipping, customs, method of payment, invoicing, packing, guaranteed landed costs, purchase orders, moving samples into inventory, freight forwarders, custom brokers, air and ocean routes, and returns to foreign vender's. This meeting was quite an educational experience for me because I go to learn all about how foreign sales are done, what can and cannot go through customs and homeland security, and I learned about how merchandise is classified. I think this tool will help me in any sales/retail market I am in and it is also good information to know as a traveler. After the almost two hour meeting we went to lunch. After lunch I attended an EDI meeting with Nancy and her assistant buyers. EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange, it basically is a new sales reporting tool that will allow all vendors and merchants to access and view the same selling information. In the meeting we learned about how to use the new communication system and found out which vendors have access to it and which do not. This pretty much wrapped up my day because it ended at 5:00 and I am super exhausted!