Jil Sander: Details, Details, Details

I have heard it said that fashion exists in the details. She who spoke these words was no doubt referring to a shiny set of buttons or a fine example of meticulous tailoring, but I saw evidence of this in everything I did this past summer. It made no difference whether I was dressing a model during Market Week or learning how to enter an order into one of our many processing systems; a tiny slip up could turn out to be a bonafide catastrophe, while careful attention invariably contributed to success.

The first example I mentioned was Market Week, so let me expand upon that. If there is any time during a fashion internship that can be complained about (excluding Fashion Week, which is a whole other mess), it is Market Week. Needless to say, things get hectic with 7 picky clients coming in each day- most of their sessions overlapping as they struggle to extend their stays far beyond their alotted hours- 2 entire floors of collections to wade through, 4 demanding account executives giving orders, and 4 lanky models, 2 dressers, and 2 interns crammed into a 5 by 7 foot room, throwing clothing on and off and frantically rushing to return items to clients and their proper racks. And yet, still, the most important part in all of this was my ability to carefully tie a dress in just the right way, to walk serenely into the showroom with head held high, and with no more than three garments daintily dangling from my right hand.

No one stressed this more than our very capable Vice President, Laura Vazquez. I always loved watching her handle the madness, for not only did she never slip up, she was always on the lookout for what more she could do. Whenever a model came back from a client, she would ask, "Did they like that? Ah, just the top?" and then she would be off in a flash to grab three more tops that complimented the last. Being able to arrange the order of the looks that went out to our clients resulted in much more successful sales and also groomed Jil's reputation for meticulousness. As a luxury brand, this careful attention to detail is not just appreciated, but demanded by our clients. If they noticed that our racks were not perfectly organized, and if every hanger were not facing the same direction and evenly spaced, we would hear snide comments. These comments did not bode well for sales, so we were trained to stay alert for them always, and to immediately correct any such issues.

I learned this same lesson during the administrative portion of my internship, but for a very different reason. At the beginning of my internship, I worked, for the most part, under the womenswear account executive, Sara. She did her work confidently and efficiently, so whenever she would airily wave me over to teach me how to complete a certain task, she would preface with, "You don't really need to know how to do this because it's my job, but..." Regardless of her disclaimers though, I always tried to pay attention- and did that ever pay off. 3 short weeks later, Sara suddenly announced that she was leaving Jil, leaving us scrambling to cover her responsibilities. Nick, our menswear account executive, did his best to take over her job, but the next thing we knew, he was flying off to Milan for Men's Market Week. That left me and my fellow intern at the helm. We had to figure out everything- from the proper process for checking out samples to PR companies, to entering orders and locating credit information. We had help from a few others in the office, but there was much that even they didn't know. If I had taken Sara at her word and hadn't listened as closely during her "unnecessary" explanations, I can't even imagine what would have happened. Entering even one number incorrectly in an order, let alone larger errors such as entering them into the wrong system or labeling them with the wrong delivery date, can cause disasters for production and muddle relations with customers.

While it may sound like this demand for perfection was a strain on us all (and I won't deny that it was), I never resented it. In fact, I think that it is the sole reason why, not just Jil, but any company is able to rise up in the world. Learning to perfect our branding, understand each quirk of our customers, and perform our duties without error are imperative to success.

In fashion, a boldly colored zipper can make a boot this season's hot item, and a higher threadcount can upgrade a suit from an insurance broker's Wednesday-wear to His Majesty Prince William's wedding attire. No one appreciates a slob, so you can bet that when my boss complained that I hadn't turned up the collar of a blouse at just the right angle, I did not look at her like she had lost her mind. I sucked it up and got it right the next time.

-Lennie Zhu

End of Summer - My Takeaways

Woo! The end of the summer is finally here! Who would have known it would go that quickly! I figure as my final entry to this blog, I should probably give an overview of the projects I completed and worked on this summer.

Press Project

· Task: Create press pages for 2000-2011 through the company's website editor

◦ Actually able to teach myself the editing software, gained sufficient knowledge of the editor by the end of the summer.

◦ Serious discipline and patience in uploading and converting press files.

◦ Knowledge about the type of advertisement that Alchimie has received over the years>> comprehensive view of how the brand has grown.

◦ Expanded my knowledge of blogging as a movement, I wasn't aware that blogs were so prevalent and so influential.

Beauty Research

◦ Task: Compile relevant beauty industry news in a document, sent them out to all company team members and keep tracking of pricing of our products sold on various retail websites.

▪ Continuously updated on industry news.

▪ Experience in reading through a plethora of information and compiling key information. Practice in deciding what stories are more interesting and hard-hitting, good for a future in PR.

▪ Reminded me of things I learned in my economics and business policy classes my freshman year and the power of pricing on a company's image and profits.

Showroom Appearance

· Task: short term project in reorganizing the appearance of the showroom shelves

◦ Adding more of an aesthetically simplistic feel to the showroom.

◦ I got a better understanding the power of merchandising and understanding that the way you display your product can have a powerful impact on profits and perception of that product.

Social Media

◦ Task: Update Alchimie foursquare account and implement trial specials to increase showroom walk-in traffic.

▪ Learned even more that social media is integral in any business' development in this day and age.

QR codes

◦ Task: research the use of QR codes and brainstorm ways to make them useful to Alchimie

▪ Created a free QR code that is now found in all Alchimie email signatures that links people to the facebook like page. The code will soon be turned into a window decal to be displayed in the showroom.

▪ QR codes are up and coming and are another form of quick relatively cheap advertising. I had never head of them before but I find them wildly interesting, especially the way various fashion brands are implementing them.

General Internship Take-Aways:

It was incredibly amazing to learn the ins and outs of a very small business, learning what type of team member dynamics, business principles, work ethic, and determination it takes to keep a business afloat in this economy. I found it refreshing to have appointed tasks every day rather than trying to create my own schedule as I had to in other internships. I found that professionalism is a character trait that I have been trying to build since I got to college and is definitely something I was able to expand upon while at Alchimie. I learned how to appropriately word emails , answer the phone properly, initiate ideas and get my messages across clearly.

At our initial meeting in the beginning of the summer, Ada's advice for me was to try and do before asking. Meaning that I would try and gather all the information I needed on a topic, mull it over, do until I couldn't anymore, and then, only at that point, ask for assistance. In essence, Ada was pushing me to be more self-reliant, which is a trait that will undoubtedly assist me in further internships, and even more generally, in life. I learned the value of minimizing the number of back and forth emails by including all the information necessary in one email with a suggestion on how to proceed so that the reader of the email knew all they needed in order to respond appropriately and quickly. All in efforts to increase productivity.

I learned a lot about showroom and business space etiquette, how to keep the workspace orderly and conducive to company success. I also learned a lot about the family aspect of Alchimie, the strong effort to “keep it in the family”, with monthly global conference calls, our meeting with Ada's mother, Barbara earlier in the summer, weekly highlights, US team conference calls; all in an effort to keep every member of the team well connected and well updated despite the vast distances between them.

Being a sophomore in college, I'm still trying to figure out what my career path will be and what industry it will be in, and this internship gave me a wealth of knowledge about the beauty/skincare industries, and I feel like they may be industries that I would like to be involved in in the future, or at least learn more about.

I so greatly appreciate all that Ada, Kate and the whole Alchimie team have done for me this summer. It has been an invaluable experience and I will certainly be keeping in touch for years to come!

-Nanette Nunu

LF USA: Overall Intern Experience

My experience at Li & Fung was very different from what I expected. I decided to intern there in production because it was a part of the business I knew nothing about and what better place to learn about it than at the biggest sourcing company in the world? Since my internship was at LF USA, Li & Fung’s American wholesale subsidiary, I also ended up learning a lot about sales, design, product development (especially private label and proprietary), and brand management. It was very interesting to gain a better understanding of a company primarily built on acquisitions of smaller apparel manufacturers and the way in which companies that fall under the LF USA interact with one another. For instance, companies such as Oxford and Regatta or Kids Headquarters and the recently acquired Fishman & Tobin are still direct competitors even though they are now technically part of one company.

Overall, it was a great learning experience, especially because of the way the internship was structured. Apart from day-to-day work within each one of our divisions, interns were assigned groups of ten and given a project which we later presented to top executives at the company. My team’s project was on e-commerce, and more specifically on how LF USA can expand its online business. Learning about this growing, exciting part of the marketplace definitely influenced my career decisions moving forward. While I’ve learned that online commerce (as any retail) is hard to get right, I’ve also realized that there are still massive amounts of opportunity and innovation on the e-commerce horizon, and that I would really love to be a part of it in the future!

If you have any interest in reading up more on what other Li & Fung interns had to say about the program, check out The Future of Fashion blog sponsored by Fashion Scholarship Fund (which is how most of us were connected to LF in the first place!).

xx,

Marlena

Hello Everyone + Free Love

Hello, all!

Lennie speaking. I certainly have a lot to say about this past summer and my work at Jil Sander, and I must apologize for taking so long to finally get it together! On the plus side, now that my internship has ended, I’ll hopefully be able to more clearly articulate everything I’ve learned over the course of this long summer.

Last Friday was my final day at Jil, and as I bid my coworkers goodbye, I was struck by the ease with which I found myself embracing them and giving heartfelt promises to keep in contact. I still remember my tense first day; I had gotten to work early, at 8:45AM, eager to make a good first impression. Instead, my plan backfired on me. I crept into the building behind a distinguished looking gentleman who did not greet me (he turned out to be one of my higher up bosses- Mark Winrow, Jil Sander America’s Director of Sales). He no doubt felt just as nonplussed at seeing this strange, unfamiliar face in his home as I felt at entering this unfamiliar, stark white lair. When I reached the office, the account executives whom I had been recruited by had not yet arrived. The kind secretary that I introduced myself to had heard nothing about a new intern arriving that day, but she made me a cup of coffee anyway. By the time Nick and Sara, my supervisors and the Account Executives of Menswear and Womenswear respectively, reached the office and rescued me from my somewhat disorienting anonymity, I had resolved to impose myself helpfully upon every person in the office throughout my internship. By the end of it, I wanted everyone to not only know my name, but also remember me as “that really, really enthusiastic intern that did everything.” 

I do believe that I managed to make that resolution come true. In my time at Jil, I completed major projects with almost every person in our office and in every branch of the company, including accounting, public relations, operations, client services, and product development. What I would like to chalk this up to, as my official responsibilities had at first been to simply oversee administrative tasks and help with order entry, are constant curiosity, openly seeking out tasks from employees other than my direct bosses, and simply making sure that I was always in the right place at the right time.

Out of everything that I have gained from these experiences, I think this has been the most important lesson. Because the different branches in a fashion brand’s office do such vastly different things, there generally is not much interaction between them. This is often a very negative thing, as it takes away from each worker’s ability to comprehend the usefulness of what he or she is doing. So I made it my personal goal to blatantly ignore the divisions between departments and make myself available to all of them. This was the best possible thing I could have done, as I believe that it not only exposed me to the various goings on of the company, but also allowed me to raise awareness between departments about what was happening in other parts of the Jil world, if only vaguely.

I’ll go into more detail about the different projects I worked on in later posts- I know all you readers are busy bees! So until next time, I’ll bid you adieu, and work on stemming the huge floods of words that I always inevitably produce whenever I write….

Best,

Lennie

My Final Monday

Monday morning, on the train, and I can hardly believe this is my last week at Marc Jacobs. If you had told me, May 31st, on that 7:21 train, that this internship would fly by this fast, would have been hard pressed to believe you. I am happy to say, though, that I have gotten so much more out of this experience than I ever thought I would.

First off, I have to admit that I have such a heightened respect for people who commute everyday to and from New York. They are a dedicated bunch who put up with the daily struggle and, more often than not, the unexpected delay. If the situation ever arose where I had to do this on a daily basis, I know I could; but for now, thank goodness it was only for 12 weeks.

I also have a whole new outlook on the fashion industry as a whole. Being a newcomer to the world of retail, I never looked much past the designers themselves. Besides, that's the most glamourous part anyways, isn't it?  But being behind the scenes in the business department at Marc has shown me that the key players are sometimes the women behind the computer screens, scrambling to come up with assortment plans for their next meeting with Imagine X Department Store in Hong Kong. And being able to participate in this, even though it might seem to them like everyday tasks, was an awesome experience for me. Not to go without mention, these business department women are also quite the fashionistas. I didn't meet one person at Marc who didn't have a passion for the brand.

With that being said, this leads me to my last revelation of this final Monday. On my way out of the office on Friday I snapped this picture:

This might seem like just a bunch of sewing machines older than the ones you used in your middle school home-ec class, and in fact, they probably are. But these oldies but goodies reminded me that fashion and retail are living, breathing entities. They are constantly changing, and deserve that much respect at least, from every department, client, and customer. Those bolts of fabric leaning casually against the wall are waiting to be turned into next season's hit bag. Those boxes of thread next to the business departments binder supply will be used later to tailor that dress for Sarah Jessica Parker so she looks smashing in August's photo shoot for Vogue. And who knows, maybe she'll love the dress so much she'll walk off the set with it.  Talk about merchandise marketing right there. (I'm pretty sure this actually happened. Perks of sharing a room with part of the logistics team).

I'm about to pull into Newark and switch to the PATH where things can get pretty hairy in terms of iPad typing. But there are so many more things I want to talk about, now that I can look back on this summer as a whole, so expect some more posts soon!