Indian Merchandisers Sharp In Product Development but Lack in Detailing

The buyers are in search of something different and appealing

With shrinking budgets and demanding consumers, based on rapidly changing fashion trends, buyers are now looking more towards their suppliers to give ideas and directions in fashion. This changing attitude of the buyer has placed increasing responsibilities on the buying agencies to provide sourcing support for not only present ideas but concepts to create new looks and fabrics appealing to the consumer base of the retailer. With this widening scope of buying operations, merchandisers, who are responsible to interact and interpret buyer’s needs, are entrusted with the job of product development and sourcing.

Senior merchandisers are expected to be equipped with knowledge and insight to suggest different yarns, weaves, fabrics, blends. For this they require to be innovative and proactive to suggest as per buyer’s needs and profile. This is indeed challenging as the prices have dropped 15-20% in the last six years the demands of the quality have to be intelligent enough to source from not only the country but from all over the world to quote prices that’s acceptable to the buyer.

Merchandisers have to be trained to not only work out the best possible price but also advise design limitations to buyers an suggest alternative options. Sometimes orders have to be placed with the vendors outside the country to ensure the business is retained by the agency.

With their understanding of the buyer, merchandisers are expected to know how much he is willing to pay and offer only those developments, which suit his budget. This added responsibility of combining development and price has made the role of merchandiser more than just that of ‘production trackers’. The job is more hand on. In fact the basic job of tracking has become more difficult and demanding. The pressure is constantly on the merchandiser to bring in the business from the buyers and not let him take away business to the other destinations to buying offices. Marketing for the new buyers is not part of a merchandiser’s operations. Separate people are trained to make new presentations to new perspective clients.

Merchandisers need to be product-specific and be challenging

To optimize the potential of the merchandisers, we at Textiles Sourcing are departmentalizing merchants according to products and not accounts. A different set of merchandisers is looking after woven shirts and knit shirts even if they belong to the same buyer. I feel that product -specific merchandisers are better equipped for the challenges that that the job throws up in today’s context. A merchandiser with the basic knowledge of a product is a better team member for that category. An ideal team for any product would be one senior merchandiser with two assistants (one more experienced) and a quality controller.

Though Indian merchandisers are very sharp in sourcing, pricing, innovations and crisis management they are lacking as compared to merchandiser in Hong Kong in the eye of details in color matching. Pattern making and giving correct response to comments and queries made by the buyer in the approval process is not a strong area and a lot of stuff is sent approval, which should never have been sent in the first place.

Many times because of the lack of knowledge of fits and patterning, comments from the buyer like ‘I don’t like the collar, it is not covering the back, or the’ the armpit is too tight’ is simply passed on the vendor without providing solution. In many cases the factory ay also not have the right type of people to provide solutions and a sample is resubmitted with minor adjustments, which in all probability will be rejected again. This to- and- fro of samples wastes a lot of valuable time. If the merchandiser has an idea of how to solve the objection, the process would be faster and less irritating for the buyer.

Where Indian merchandisers definitely score, is in the sourcing of raw materials. They are constantly surprising to find out new sources at much lower cost sometimes even making a difference of $ 2 one meter of fabric. Sometimes even suggestions in ways to cut cost are coming from the merchandisers which was not seen or expected from even three years back.

Because of their growing proactive ness and willingness to apply their skills, more and more company needs are willingly giving them independence of operations in matters purely related to approvals and sampling. Since the market and product is the key to get business today, merchandisers are gaining in the professional ladder and are considered important employees in a garment set – up.

Further , now as buyers are in a position to select fabric from one place and do production from the other , the job of a merchandiser is additionally broken down into two basic segments- one responsible for costing , pricing and development work , while the other for monitoring follow – ups, if any. Even today I am seriously thinking of dividing my merchandising operations into two well – defined roles for optimization and greater productivity.