What Does A Fashion Product Manager Do

Life as a Fashion Product Manager

As a Fashion Product Manager I am responsible for a category (in my case, ladies shoes) and everything that is related to it: sourcing the best suppliers (being careful if they are able to produce the quantities in the quality I need and also if they are social and environmentally responsible), researching the current and future fashion trends, develop products with these suppliers, monitor competition, negotiate, buy, and control KPIs (such as sales, margin, markdown, stock).

To me, the most interesting and fun part of this job is that being so varied, it doesn’t have an exhaustive routine. Yes, I need to respect deadlines and a calendar, but there is a lot of traveling and other activities you can perform outside the office. I love to communicate and this is also a job where you have to be in touch with people all the time, constantly negotiating, persuading, discussing.

One of the things that I like the most is traveling. For this job, I’ve had the opportunity to travel to New York, Paris, Milan, Berlin, London, Dubai, Hong Kong. These cities are great to get inspired to the upcoming collections, to see the ways luxury brands are thinking the business and how fashion is worn on the streets.

My Typical Day

I will walk you through a typical day of a Fashion Product Manager – first, wherever you are, check sales numbers from the previous day! And this is the only thing you’ll do everyday.

The rest of the day depends on the time of the year. I could be attending a results meeting with the department, discussing the product with the style team, or the budget with the planning team. We always have one foot in the present (what is happening now, with the collection we’ve bought) and another in the future (based on trends and what is going on with sales now). So, I cannot give you a day, but roughly the flow of a season – it starts with the evaluation of last season (what worked best and what didn’t).

We, as a team, evaluate all the aspects of the collection and we define a budget for the next season (refining product, assortment, pricing). With the numbers made, it is time to transform them into products. The Style team discusses the best bets for the season, and this is where we also define how much risk we are willing to take (in terms of fashion level and pricing). Both Style and Product Managers travel to these cities that are inspiring the collection and take pictures, buy samples to confirm the trends. This is where the product gets shapes, colors, materials, details defined.

Product Managers now go to suppliers and turn this vision into reality. Suppliers then send us samples and prices, and with the map of the collection, we have designed with the budget and the style team we chose products and flow from the collection. We negotiate prices, refine the last details product wise and finally we issue orders. Once goods arrive in stores, I can check their performance and then decide what we have to buy more or what needs to be discounted.

Pros

One of the most interesting parts of this job is that it gives you a wide vision of the market. You can get in touch with styling, planning, logistics, production, sales, buying, marketing, visual merchandising… There are so many aspects involved in the birth of a collection and each part of the process is under the responsibility of the product manager. He is the one in charge to connect all the dots.

It may sound corny, but there is a feeling of achievement when you see the final product ready for sale in store (and if it becomes a best seller it is almost better than sex!!)

Last but not least… you never stop learning. Market changes so fast it is almost impossible to sit over the success or failures. You have to be open to these changes, absorb them, own them… And do it differently to grow. It is a clichê, but a very true one, “you can never expect different results when you are doing the same things”.

Cons

Talking about the not so good part of this job, I believe the pressure for achieving results is the most difficult. Sometimes we are under the eye of the hurricane, pressured to develop products with “out of this world” value for money and it can be an easy choice to slip into some bad practices. It is important to be ethically responsible and attentive to make sure that all of your partners respect the same values you have (such as good work conditions and respect for the environment). Sometimes we need to work extra hours, even weekends (yes, retail!) I remember the day of my college graduation, I was already doing the training for the company I was working for at the time… It was on a Sunday, but it was also Christmas time…so loads of work! My manager let me take the morning off and I had to run to the ceremony, had lunch with my family, and rushed back to work.

Advice to aspiring Fashion Product Managers

This career is not about being Carrie Bradshaw and wearing all the latest trends yourself – even though you can do it… dress code, in general, is very flexible. My advice to someone that is considering this path is to be curious about everything and understand the moment we’re living to offer clients the BEST product choice for that particular timing. Let’s say you have bought a big order of party dresses for Xmas 2020… What would you do after COVID19 hit the world? I would say – hurry and try to change as much as possible for beautiful pajamas and create the most amazing homewear collection you can. I have studied Marketing and became a Product Manager myself almost by accident. My goal was to work with Branding and I thought Product Management on retail would be similar to the industry. Couldn’t be more wrong, it is very different… but it was too late, I was already in love. This is not a career that will demand you a specific major, I had co-workers that were engineers, lawyers, or journalists… What they had in common was this ability to communicate, the eye for opportunities, and the capacity to take risks.