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A Rather Curious Thing
Our first season cost a LOT of money to develop. Like brand new mid-range car sort of money. This was for a few reasons… first, we ran into a few teething problems which cost money to fix. Secondly, I made some mistakes (and mistakes are seldom free). I also got a bit carried away with sampling.
Specifically, I sampled every single colour of every single style and in some cases, I doubled up.
Second season, in an attempt to not go quite so crazy on the financial front, I thought hey… surely I don’t need to sample in EVERY colour. I mean, people know what colour cream is and what colour black is. As long as they have the fabrics to look at and at least one colour of the style is made up in the fabric, I won’t need every colour.
Well, I think I may have been wrong. So far, not one single person has ordered a style in a colour that wasn’t sampled.
So what’s the deal? It’s the job of these people to have vision. They are buying for a whole store (or several stores!), up to six months in advance. They have to be able to predict what will be popular and what will sell.
In the case of regular consumers, it’s generally accepted that items will sell far better if the customer can see the product they’re getting in the colour they want… but could this be true for store buyers as well? I would tend to argue that perhaps the colours in which I sampled just happen to be the most popular, if it weren’t for the fact that the colours we didn’t sample in are typically the most popular – black and cream/white.
With this in mind, the question remains – is it worth the cost to sample in every single colour, or better to try and pick what will be most popular?
Hey Sam,
Another great question!!! Just thought i’d throw in my 2 cents worth from my old ‘buying’ days … I used to get bugged when presented with incomplete sample ranges because it made it that much more difficult to get in the ‘zone’ and visualise the collection on the shelf/rack whatever!! I know this sounds slack, and you are right we should be able to pick the winners/losers, but its more just about the fact that with sooooo many other buying choices/decisions flying around in my head it became hard to focus purely on the one at hand – and having to ‘imagine’ missing items when pulling out my picks just makes it that little bit more difficult. So i reckon its worth $$$ just to make sure nothing slips through the cracks! (Having said this – you’re not alone. It was very common for people to skip colours – but usually just black.) Hope that helps – some how!!! xxx Annie
I think it was really easy form your last collection to visualise pieces- plus as you had the different pieces in different combinations it made it easy to just go “One of those please!” This season is a little harder because there are so many versions of colours- as a non designer I can get overwhelmed and just pick the one from the picture!