Never One Place, Always One Jacket

All summer term I could not wait to have a break from school and go on coop. My parents would laugh and say to me “who enjoys working 40 hours a week? I’d much rather still be in class.” While I got to see my friends all of the time, class got tiring and I was so ready to get out and apply what I had been learning for the past seven terms in the real world. I got the coop that I wanted and even though I was enjoying my “summer break” I was eager to start. I work for the Full Circle Group, LLC in West Chester, PA. The Full Circle Group, LLC is an agency that represents the mid-Atlantic region for The North Face. There are 13 people that work for the company and there are about four or five people in the office on a daily basis; a majority of the employees are traveling Reps, so they aren’t always in the office. Everyone works together like one big family and since we work out of a house, it is such a comfortable environment where within just the past week, I’ve learned so much. 

On my first day I was thrown right into preparing and organizing the samples from the Spring 2014 line so that we could ship them back to The North Face Headquarters in California. There are four reps that house their samples in our office in West Chester when they are not traveling to show them to the buyers. Since it is the end of the selling season for Spring 2014, it was my job to collect the samples from each rep and prepare them to be packed. I spent my entire day playing memory with countless numbers of rolling racks and getting on my tippy toes to stuff the racks until there was no more room. It gave me a chance to see every activity category that The North Face designs for. Since The North Face uses the Activity Based Model, all of the apparel and equipment varies based on activity; like performance, outdoors, or action sports, so I was able to see a wide variety of samples. Along with that each piece that they create whether it be tents, apparel, sleeping bags, accessories, or shoes has some type of special technology built into it to make it unique and to reach it’s maximum utility; which I found interesting as I sorted through all of the samples.

On my second day, the entire team, including the reps from the New York City showroom, showed up bright and early at 8am to finish sorting the samples and got them all packed up ready to go back to California. It was great to meet everyone that works for Full Circle, LLC and learn more about what each person does for the company. By the end of the day we had close to 60 large boxes filling the garage ready to be sent off, it felt great to see how hard we worked and what we could accomplish when we worked very hard as a team. Of course we took some breaks and had some fun by doing Crossfit challenges each time we packed a box; it helped break up the day for sure.

My third day, we got to the office early again to go over each Rep’s goal that they set for the Spring 14 season and how they accomplished it or what hardships they ran into with the goals they had set out to reach. Since everyone had different techniques with their selling, I found it very interesting how buyers respond differently to the various techniques and how each Rep had to tailor what they were doing to different stores. For example you can’t sell the same way to a camping specialty store as you would to Urban Outfitters or a department store. We then took a break in the middle of the day and went to the Crossfit gym in West Chester. I had so much fun doing Crossfit and really hope that we do it again even though most of us were sore after. It was a great team building exercise and it worked us to our limits. It also got us out of the office to have a break between meetings because for the remainder of the day we had a GTM meeting (Going to Market) where we talked about the new line and what we have to do to beat out our competitors for the upcoming season.

The next day I unpacked and scanned the new Fall 2014 samples we received and then organized them for each rep. I also scanned the carry over items and equipment so that we could get as much work out of the way as possible before the bulk of the Fall 14 samples came in. 

 On Friday, I ordered my clothes for the sales meeting in Lake Tahoe and designed a billboard to hang above a fixture for our products for a store in Syracuse.

Overall, the first week of coop, I definitely hit the ground running but I’ve learned so much already. I am so excited to see what else is in store and the adventures I will go on in the next six months.