Traveling and working with so many different buyers is amazing. I could not ask for a better Co-op with the many different things I get to exprience. I love finding myself in a different state every week and being home with my friends on the weekend but it definitely can get tiring. For the past month, a typical week for me consists of unpacking, doing laundry, packing, and hitting the road to get the line where it needs to go. Setting up our temporary showroom in a hotel, and going to sleep late and then waking up, showing the line a bunch of times, wrapping it up and repeating. When the end of the week comes we clean up the show room and get home so we can sleep. Even though I get more than enough sleep on the road when I go home and go into hibernation mode it's literally the best feeling in the world.
By showing the line multiple times a day to various types of buyers I have learned a ton about all types of different features on a jacket. So much so that if I'm walking down the street I don't even have to see a North Face logo on a jacket to know what kind of jacket it is and then literally every single thing there is to know about the jacket just starts coming out of my mouth, I can't even stop it. My friends think it's crazy but I don't even care because it shows how much I've been learning through meeting with the buyers and assisting with line presentations. It can haunt you though sometimes because last Saturday when I got home, I had a dream where I was just spitting out information about jackets. It's one thing to say you could talk about the line in your sleep and another to actually do it. This must be what I get for going to sleep before 10:30 on a Saturday. Call me an old woman but I don't even care because I value the one day a week where I can sleep in.
To add to that, I went to the Cherry Hill mall with my friend this past weekend and we saw The North Face store and knew we wouldn't pass it without going in. It was super busy and there weren't a lot of employees. Most of the customers didn't seem like they were super educated outdoorsmen that know a lot about our technology. I was so tempted to just start rattling off things they should know about the jackets they were looking at but, I restrained myself because it was the one day I had to have off without thinking about technical apparel.
Either way, I love my Co-op and clearly am incorporating it in my every day life.
I couldn't ask for anything better!
Did you see the New York Times article about North Face this Sunday? It sounded like they are embarrassed that so many non-athletes love their apparel.
ReplyDeleteI just read it. It's actually really interesting because I run into buyers having conversations like this all of the time! I actually was just telling my dad about how I had a line presentation today with a ski shop and then went into a lifestyle presentation and they were completely different buyers. It's funny because I talk about this all the time and now people are talking about it on a larger scale.
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