What is fashion merchandising?

You must have heard someone talk about fashion merchandising career sometime, maybe your friend or a family member. You also probably heard someone talk about fashion merchandisers and fashion designers. You probably just did not pay attention to what he/she was saying because of the word “merchandising” used in the same sentence with fashion. I mean placing these two words together and pronouncing it sounds like they don’t fit but trust me, it’s really big. So, what is fashion merchandising and what does a fashion merchandiser do?

What is fashion merchandising?

Fashion merchandising is the marketing, management, and distribution of fashion products in order to make profits. Fashion merchandisers are intensely aware of past and present fashion trends to know what consumers want and satisfy them.

Fashion Merchandisers and Fashion Designers

Fashion Merchandisers are not fashion designers, but they are close to the fashion designers and everything that concerns fashion. They also use their fashion sense and their relations with the consumers to determine how much of a particular design to stock, negotiate with the producers, and communicate with the designers to know what to keep producing and what to stop. If you wanted to make it look or sound simpler, just say fashion merchandisers buy and selling clothes for a living. It is only that they do more than that.

What does a fashion merchandiser do?

Fashion merchandising is quite broad. From the name, we see that  the role of a fashion merchandiser combines  both fashion and merchandising, and requires an impeccable sense of style and fashion in addition to a very vast business sense. Here are the things a fashion merchandiser does

A fashion merchandiser does three major things:

Knowing the current fashion trend

Fashion merchandisers keep up with the latest fashion news, attend fashion shows, and communicate regularly with fashion designers to know what people want and what’s new . Fashion merchandisers are also expected to be able to blend fashion sense, know what people will likely ask for when they visit their stores.

Ability to manage both fashion and price

This is where fashion and merchandising meet. The merchandiser’s ability to know what is trending is used to decide how to stock his stores. He would know the new styles to order and reorder the quantity of items, the colors and sizes to order. The fashion merchandiser has a budget and has to make sure his orders are within that budget. Part of this process is buying and negotiating with manufacturers and designers to make sure items can be priced in a way that will sell and make a profit.

Marketing and promotion

In most cases fashion merchandisers are the ones who advertise to get customers. That requires marketing skills and a keen understanding of local customer demographics. To advertise their products, the merchandisers take different measures to make sure that their wares are seen. Some even go as far as creating discounts, printing fliers and dong other things to be seen.

 Fashion Merchandising Careers include

  • Merchandising Manager– Merchandising managers generally oversee all the retail functions in a store
  • Marketing Representative– Marketing representatives promote a company’s products to the identified target markets.
  • Fashion Buyer– Fashion buyers are responsible for selecting products and negotiating with product vendors on behalf of retail companies.
  • Merchandising Consultant– Merchandising consultants oversee the sales and marketing efforts of companies..

In Nigeria today, fashion merchandising has become very lucrative and so many people ave ventured into it. This is because merchandisers can easily follow what is trending on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook and the rest of it. For example, Tiwa Savage wears a very pretty dress today, you see it in stores tomorrow because the fashion merchandisers  have access to the designers and they have also made themselves well acquainted with what people want to buy. When you have the right tools, fashion merchandising would be very easy for you.

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