Assistant Retail Merchant, Lands End

My name is Austin Hurd. I'm an Assistant Merchant for women's knit tops at the company, Land's End. As an Assistant merchant, I work from product development all the way through the process of from when a product starts being created until it is actually selling with the customer. So I'm looking at current trends in the retail industry, as well as analyzing data on our current selling, to figure out what products we should be selling to our customer. So the life cycle starts immediately from the actual product creation, so the idea of the product. What are we looking for for our customers? Currently working on spring product for 2020, so we're working very far in advance, and it's right now in the stages of just an idea. You always have to have contingency plans, figuring out how can we fast track an item to get it there now. If something becomes big, how do we get that product from just an idea to quickly out to the customer extremely fast. Sometimes an item that you thought was going to be a big idea does not become that big idea by the time it actually goes to the customer. So it's always good to just have backup plans. A busy week is really more just making sure that I'm keeping in constant communication with my cross-functional teams. So I work with designers. I work with our sourcing team for fabrics. I work with our planning team, just making sure that everyone is currently on the same loop, so no one gets left behind, and so everyone is on the same page. I mostly do all of my work in office. We do sometimes work from home when it just gets too snowy out, but we do have some travel trips where we go and do some competitive shopping. What that entails is, we go and look, usually we go to Chicago and for the day we go and look and see what other vendors are doing, other companies. Just making sure that we are aligned currently with the market trends.