With the start of a new employee not only was I able to learning from her training sessions, but I was also needed for additional work since the other assistant buyer was training her. The training focused on the understanding of the excel spreadsheets I spoke about during the beginning of my internship as well as learning how to use the computer systems to look certain information up, including item selling. It amazes me how much information buyers have regarding a particular item. Our system ranks the sales of each item down to the size or color you are interested in, showing which was most successful and if you over or under sold. With all this information you can plan appropriately for the following year when ordering similar items. It makes the job of predicting what our shopper will want just a little bit easier.

One of my big tasks that took up a good part of one day was updating an assortment plan for a new store that is opening in October. This spreadsheet needs to be created for the buyers to reference when working with allocation on how to divide the merchandise throughout the store. It was great for me to work with this spreadsheet because I was able to become more familiar with the product as well as the classes and divisions that the product is broken down into.

The Stuff the Bus bake sale, which the interns planned, took place this Wednesday. It proved to be a success however I wished we had baked more because we sold out of everything well before the end of the sale. We raised a good amount of money that will help the children and now we know how much food to get when it comes to our donut/breakfast sale next week. Hopefully, breakfast foods are as big a success as baked goods!

On behalf of my buyer I had to call a dozen stores regarding a production problem on a pair of denim pants that just hit the stores. We had received a few complaints regarding the top button, that is was too hard to undo. Bass canceled the shipment of additional SKUs of this item as it would most likely cause a high return rate as well as dissatisfied customers. This was very useful in practicing my communication skills and confidence while talking to the manager of each store.

Again this week I have been assisting the Bass accessory buyers with entering their TOPs. This has pretty much become a routine. It is a simplistic task but takes time, which as we all know, is something we lack. So, I help the buyers with entering all the new merchandise and checking to make sure the production is of our standard, which forces me to be very detail oriented.

Additionally, I worked on tasks involving our non-outlet stores. The assortment plans were being completed and spreadsheets needed to be constructed with what assortment each store was receiving. I was able to see what these specialty stores are receiving compared to the regular outlet stores and what the store layout would be.

Until next time!!