Oasis Day 5

Today consisted of doing odd bits and bob jobs that'd I'd done last week. I did learn what ROS meant today, and it means Rate Of Sale, which is the rate at which an item is predicted to sell out. It is dependent on how many sales it makes in a day/week. The lower the ROS the better, as it means it sells out quickly meaning more sales. I'm pretty proud I remembered it.

I think my brain is coming around to this whole maths and numbers thing. I don't want to jinx it but I bet I have now..

People I've met count: 6
No. of things learnt: 11
Brain ache scale: 2/10

I may just do a round up come Friday (my last day) of my experience of merchandising as a whole and Oasis, what do ya think? I think I'm gonna do it...

Oasis Day 4

With it being my fourth day, I'm in more of a morning routine now, getting on with the previous days daily sales, and then carrying on with other tasks I hadn't finished from the previous day.

I was then shown how to fill in the best and worst sheets, unlike the other day when all I had to do was to print them. This meant I got to look at the pictures of the product which was a bit more exciting to me than the spreadsheets. Although, of course, it ended up being a lot more mathematical than that, and looking a the main DS to fill out its core information. There were a lot and I mean A LOT of these to fill in and I only had till 3 to finish as then the office was starting to set up for their Christmas party. So I'm sure I'll be picking this back up as on Monday. Unless it was needed for Friday and in that case the MAA Steph would have finished it for me...

Friday was a bit of a write-off as I wasn't very well so didn't go in. Slightly worried I may have forgotten how to do things by tomorrow as I've been off for three days now but I'm sure I'll pick it up in no time.

People I've met count: 6
No. of things learnt: 10
Brain ache scale: 4/10

Here I go into my final week! 

Oasis Day 3

Today was significantly better than expected. I was dreading doing the daily sales report by myself this morning but it was a lot less painful than I thought. I think my mood lifted when I'd restored faith in myself that I could actually do it un-aided.

For the first hour as I said I completed the daily sales for jersey and denim, and was slightly relieved I didn't have to do accessories. I then completed checking the cost prices from the day before, which is one of the jobs I liked so things only began to get better. Steph had mentioned adding images from the Oasis site onto the Best & Worst spreads the day before but I think I ran out of time so today all I had to do was get these ready and print and photocopy them ready for each departments meeting with the directors - trying to do this when your printer wont cooperate is a bit of a challenge but got there in the end. As the name suggests, these are a selection or up to 10 of the best and worst sellers from the previous season. As they're focussing on SS14, this involved using SS13 information to help see what they wanted to use this season, colour or style wise.

I was also shown how to add to the Ratio Banks. These are (yes, you guessed it) spreadsheets that work out the ratio of what stock is sold of a certain item and if we over or underestimated the amount of stock we've got. For example on a certain top we expected to sell 3% of it but actually sold 8%, which shows us we need to be sending more out as it's clearly a big hit. When I'm explained these things, I understand it, but trying to explain it in my own words is such a struggle, gah.

Using my knowledge of the daily sales, I also learnt how to check these for whole sale. As you may or may not know, Oasis are also available on ASOS and on other sites such Zalando, Koovs and Little Woods, so we need to make sure the cost price, product code, name of the product etc are correct so they know what they're selling the product at and what to call it. So this is important. As I was saying to Steph earlier, I've seen some brands on ASOS selling things at a cheaper price than the brand itself and it's obviously down to this - pretty cool!

I think that about sums up today, the only real thing I struggled with was checking the whole sale DS so not bad!

People I've met count: 8
No. of things learnt: 12
Brain ache scale: 3/10 - getting better.
See ya tomorrow!

Oasis Day 2

Another day, another spreadsheet. Today was another day of being shown how to input information into the merchandisers excel documents under jersey, denim and accessories. Of course they all have totally different ways of doing the same thing just to make it that much easier for me.. joke.

Today was mainly about learning how to do the daily sales. I met another MAA called Stephanie who has been with the company for 3 months so far, as Nicola has now left so Steph is the person I go to if I need help.

Daily sales is pretty self explanatory - if you don't include all the numbers. It involves working out basically what all the stores took the previous day, but only in the jersey, denim and accessory departments. Using sheets that have been filled out but the company director already with figures, it's a case of inputting these figures into the correct places on the spreadsheet and a percentage is worked out for you (thank god). But there is some maths involved, something you have to do some timing and working out the percentage to time it by yourself, which is where I tend to get confused.

After this, I was then shown how to produce labels. These are used by the buyers in all the meets, as they hang off the garments they talk about it. It contains all that particular garments details such as what its sold the previous week, or what week it's coming in etc etc. Stephen then asked me to check the cost price of some jersey that had come in, and making sure what we had down on paper matched with the online documents. This involved using a programme called Mercatus which contains A LOT of info for the merch teams but I've only used it for reports and this so far. This was quite a fun task, and only involved ticking off ones that matched and marking down which ones where wrong and flagging it with steph.

One of my last tasks of the day was checking the input reports. This is a way of tracking when each shipment of stock is coming in, and again to see if what we had printed matched. I think I'll only need to do this when Jenna, the senior merch for denim, asks me to look up something so that won't be a daily routinely task.

These posts will probably lack a lot of imagery as i'm not allowed to take photos in the office, and doubt you want to see pictures of huge excel sheets with a load of numbers on.

People I've met count: 6
No. of things learnt: 7
Brain ache scale: 7/10 - this isn't good.

See ya after day three!

Oasis Day 1

As part of my second year at uni, I've got to go on a min 6 week placement, and I've decided to do two- (well more made too since I couldn't do longer at one.) My first one is at Aurora Fashions with Oasis in the merchandising department. I've never dabbled in merchandising before and don't really know too much about it apart from that it's quite numbers based which isn't my strength, but I wanted to see if I'd actually like it.

The office is based in Shoreditch (so fashion darling) and they share it with other Aurora based companies such as Coast and Karen Millan. So at half 9 on the dot (was meant to get there for 10, but I'm forever early) I stepped into the building and was greeted by Lisa who is part of HR, and she showed me round quickly and did the usual health and safety bits. Then I was introduced to Jenna, the head of denim merch and her MMA Nicola, who are both part of the merch team. The office is laid out in a sort of semi-circle shape and on the right side of the semi-circle are rows of desks with 4-5 merchandisers on one side and vice versa on the other but with buyers so it's they're opposite each other, and every desk is the same.

One of the first things Jenna explained is that the department is split up into sections, she, as I said, is in charge of denim, and she also sits with Yasmin, who is part of jersey merch. At 11:45 on a Monday, the whole floor has a meeting where the company director does an over view of the previous week, sales wise and then each sub-department presents to everyone else. They used a lot of terms which I noted down to get meanings for such as like-for-like and ROS but it is only day 1, so I'm sure I'll pick it up by the end of my time there. As this is was the first real thing I was part of on the day, it all sounded very complicated, but by the high praise the company director, the previous week had been a good one, as they made £4.7 million. Each department showed a variety of best sellers and some which didn't sell to much. Do to the season it was mainly SS wear they're pushing, but knitwear and coats took a majority of the profit.

Straight after the meeting, with the aid of Nicola, I had to fill in the company flows for denim and jersey. As they sell a variety of denim, as well as leg lengths, this was a lengthy process. This also involved using Excel, which I'm quite rusty on, especially being so used to Mac's and they use PC so it took a couple of goes to get back into the swing of things, but was alright pretty quickly. A lot of it involved just imputing data the department had already worked out using BOB spreadsheets, and each section of the department has a different BOB number. However, some other sheets, such as the company flows involved more mathematical thought. Each section I had to fill in had a shortened name which I'm obviously not used to so remembering which one meant what and collecting the right data to input was a challenge. I then moved onto the accessories department to do similar tasks to end the afternoon.

To say my first day was a challenge would be an understatement, but the heads of departments I worked with where really helpful, and were always eager to explain again when I found things difficult

People I've met count: 5
No. of things learnt: 3
Brain ache scale: 4/10

I will report back with day two tomorrow! Hopefully it wont be as lengthy.