Don't be frightened by the fast-paced, Type-A aggression described here. The business end of fashion can be highly rewarding financially if you work hard and know how to pace yourself. You get to meet a lot of exciting-and eccentric-people, and your job is never dull.
You have to enjoy putting in long hours and are gifted with outstanding communication skills. Knowledge of business and fashion products is essential.
Remain several steps ahead of the competition, and don't take rejection personally.
You don't need a degree to be successful. But education will enhance your natural talents as an outgoing person with a knack for talking confidently and enthusiastically about the items you are promoting.
Buyers and Sales Representatives
If you opt to become a buyer or sales representative, you will truly be on fashion's cutting edge. A key decision maker in determining what styles will be most popular for a season; you will carry a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. It's important that you have a solid knowledge of fabrics, buying patterns, and fashion trends, along with some general business savvy, such as pricing structures and bulk discounting.
Buyers and sales representatives work closely together. Sales reps spend a great deal of time calling or meeting with buyers to show the garments or accessories of the designer or firm they represent. If the buyer believes certain items will sell, he or she will place an order.
Most major designers and design companies have their own permanent showrooms, where buyers view and purchase new collections. New York is the showroom capital of the world. Buyers go there many times a year for "market week," the time when new collections are presented and sales made. Other fashion showroom sectors include Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
A large percentage of sales reps work primarily in showrooms. Others work independently, contacting buyers before visiting them with a bundle of samples. Known as "road reps," they spend a lot of time on the road covering specific regions for their client.
Buyers and sales reps who work out of designer showrooms are busiest just before and during market weeks-four to six times during the year when the seasonal fashion shows are held. Those employed by major manufacturers have more sanely paced schedules, but don't expect a standard 9-to-5 work day. Sales reps typically arrange their schedules to suit buyers, and entertaining prospective customers would require you to work well into the evening and on weekends.
Fashion Trade Show and Events Organizers
Designers rely on assertive trade show and events organizers to help market their creations to a large, concentrated segment of the industry. Trade shows are especially useful for jewelry and fabric designers. They are often organized through and held at major apparel centers around the world. As a trade show or events organizer, you work well in advance of targeted shows and are responsible for promoting the event to prospective exhibitors, selecting exhibitors, and earmarking key individuals and companies that should be invited.
As a corporate executive, you will work 9-to-5 hours. But, because this is the unpredictable world of fashion, you will most likely also put in several hours beyond that-including weekends.
A booming trade show area is the wedding apparel niche, where "Bridal Expos" draw in some of the largest business and consumer crowds at huge convention halls during prime seasons-fall shows featuring summer attire, for example.
The creme de la creme of the industry are the lavish and outlandish fashion shows that take place in elaborate tents erected on vast fair grounds in New York, Paris, and Milan for the spring/ summer and fall/winter collections. Some have called them circuses- but that goes with the inherently show-business terrain of fashion. The shows attract top celebrities, supermodels, and swarms of fashion journalists and photographers.
Organization of these shows is an ongoing process, with planners dealing with the capricious temperaments of famous designers and the mega egos and mood swings of big-name models. Nerves of steel and a resilient personality are absolutely necessary. This is definitely not an occupation for the faint of heart or easily intimidated.
Boutique Owners
The bottom line of any industry is making a profit. Once clothing and accessories are designed and manufactured, they reach the consumer market through stores. Big apparel chains and retail outlets make up a large segment of the market, but, if personalized service and unique designs give you an edge over the standard competition, you will garner both personal and financial rewards by owning your own boutique, or specialty store.
Although many fashion designers sell their products to department stores, at least one third of the 300,000 professional designers in the United States own their own boutiques. Even if you are not a designer, you can help designers by understanding their side of the business and promoting their work in your own small store.
As a retailer and business owner, your job will require a major time commitment, including work on weekends. Owning a business also requires accounting and marketing skills that are just as important as being familiar with the fabrics and styles a designer creates.
Fashion Window and Countertop Display Artists
If you consider yourself an artist first and a retailer second, works as a fashion window and countertop display artist could be an ideal career for you. This field is often taken for granted. How many times do you "window shop" without thinking about the planning and artistry that go into this visual advertisement, or breeze past fancy display counters, unaware of the creativity involved in making a store aesthetically pleasing? Probably quite often. Yet, the effect of eye-catching store exhibits is an important part of the selling process.
Called visual merchandising artists, managers, or directors, these insightful creators typically have backgrounds in art, theater design, and art history. They get their fashion experience on the job, often working their way up decorating various departments in large stores.
Visual merchandising artists work with store managers and other designers to invent a clever look that represents their store's philosophy, and then they tie that in with seasonal themes, humor, or city-wide promotions such as a summer festival, major sporting event, or celebrity extravaganza.
Fashion Design Publicists
When designers and stores want to get the word out about their products to millions of prospective buyers, they work with a publicist- also called a promotional specialist or public relations representative. Publicists are responsible for channeling crucial information about their clients to the media. Public relations are invaluable to this highly competitive industry, and includes working hand-in-hand with organizers of fashion shows, corporate-sponsored events, and national promotions.
Publicists can be self-employed, work for an agency, or be on the staff of a prominent fashion designer or retailer. They work around the clock in a corporate environment that makes relentless demands on their time and endurance. Most special events take place in the evening and on weekends. You must have an outgoing, enthusiastic personality-and be able to convince the media that the person or product you represent is the best. Sell constantly, always be on, and never get discouraged by the media's abrupt, curt manner.
From the Beginning: Buyers and Sales Representatives
Working part-time as a salesperson at a boutique or department store provides essential hands-on experience in the fashion business world. It also gives you a chance to track consumer buying habits and, in turn, get a head start on honing your own buying and selling techniques. Business courses help, too.
As a sales rep, your ability to initiate conversations over the telephone and in person, and to deliver an effective sales pitch, is mandatory. Start practicing early by volunteering for fund-raisers that rely on telemarketers at school or in your community. Or get a job as a telemarketer, or any type of work that requires you to make cold calls. Then, if fashion is your calling, take general courses in textiles and fabrics. Read a lot of fashion magazines to learn the lingo, and keep a record of style trends and what influences them.
From the Beginning: Fashion Trade Show and Events Organizers
If you are great at throwing parties, you will fit right into the frenetically paced world of organizing fashion trade exhibitions and special events such as groundbreaking fashion shows. However, you have to be intensely organized and endlessly driven to keep up in an arena where yesterday's chic, new ideas are old hat today. Seasoned industry veterans are accustomed to attending so many specialized industry shows that their budgets force them to streamline by attending only the ones that will benefit them the most-the best-run, best-organized, and best-attended events.
It is your job to understand what the hottest product trends are and be able to discern what gets prospective customers excited. At school, you can get your feet wet by serving on the prom committee or by coordinating student/parent fashion shows on a small scale. If you work in a store, volunteer to assist with promotions. Arts and crafts fairs are another venue where you can talk with organizers to get a feel for what they do.
From the Beginning: Boutique Owners
One of the best ways to get into the retail business is by working in it. No special degrees are required, although courses in fashion design and accounting would help immensely. Success depends on your natural talent for working with people and determining which products will sell and which ones will fall flat.
Start by working as a sales clerk at a clothing store in your neighborhood. Talk to other boutique owners and find out how they made a successful leap to self-employment. Begin saving your money, because, as a business owner, you will need capital to rent a space and purchase your merchandise.
Research neighborhoods that attract the type of business you wish to open-or find areas where you can break new ground. Work in various aspects of a store to discover how many hats you need to wear as a business owner-including obtaining necessary permits, doing accounting and inventory, buying items you plan to sell, and decorating the store.
From the Beginning: Fashion Window and Countertop Display Artists
Early experience for visual merchandising artists may be as simple as helping your school librarian creates special book exhibits or designing props for a local play. As long as you have an artist's talent and eye for appealing displays, you can pursue this field with confidence. The best training, however, is hands-on in a retail outlet, where you can assist store managers with seasonal window and in-store decorations.
You don't necessarily have to start out on the clothing floor. Most department stores place visual artists in various areas-from house wares to stationery. The key rests in your ability to draw attention to the products at hand.
Once you have moved up to the clothing or accessories sector, more on-the-job knowledge will ensue; then your talent for matching textures, patterns, and cuts will begin to emerge.
From the Beginning: Fashion Publicists
Because the fashion public relations field requires strong written and verbal communication skills, hone your craft by writing and submitting articles to your school newspaper, and concentrate on public speaking. The debate club is an excellent means for practicing sales techniques, which a good publicist must have in order to get the word out on his or her client's business.
Because publicists are very active in the organization of events, such as fashion shows, volunteer to assist with coordinating local festivities-from a holiday reception, to a student social, to a writer's workshop.
Read all types of magazines and journals; watch TV for trends; and get hooked up on the Internet-where publicity is headed into the 21st century with services such as America On-Line and Netscape, to name just a few channels through which one can access the media in cyberspace.
Educational Requirements for Buyers and Sales Representatives
Experience is probably the best education for individuals pursuing the buying and selling aspects of fashion. However, a certificate or two-year or four-year degree in marketing and/or communication, paired with a minor in textile/fashion design, would be a strategically wise career move.
With scores of aggressive businesspeople lining up to be part of the constantly changing fashion universe, it would work in your favor to have a degree to back up your qualifications, even if you are capable of selling bikinis to those fur-clad folks on the Arctic tundra.
Computer basics, such as how to enter and retrieve information, are also a must in the increasingly high-tech business world.
Educational Requirements for Fashion Trade Show and Events Organizers
Similar to buyers and sellers, a two-year or four-year degree in marketing and/or communication, combined with fine arts courses or a minor in textile/fashion design, will move your career in special events planning forward. Your academic experience will also help you perfect the necessary skills for survival in this hot-and-cold business. Marketing and public speaking courses will give you the know-how and confidence to accomplish the challenging, and hectic, tasks that await you on the job.
With a basic understanding of textiles and fashion design terminology, you will be several steps ahead of prospective events organizers who are not up on the fashion industry's language or structure. Being able to converse confidently and authoritatively will help you score points with your equally competitive superiors-paving the way for pay increases and job promotions within the profession's larger and more influential frameworks, such as New York fashion shows and big-name designer promotional blitzes.
Educational Requirements for Boutique Owners
Because most boutique owners are also designers, a degree in fashion design will certainly give you a solid foundation for producing quality garments. Those entrepreneurs who sell clothes for other designers should come to the floor equipped with at least general accounting and business courses, as well as an acute understanding of fabrics, cuts, and trends.
The most common progression for boutique owners involves starting out as a salesperson at a specialty or department store, then moving up to various buying and managerial levels before branching out on their own once they have done all the necessary networking and made solid industry contacts.
Educational Requirements for Fashion Window and Countertop Display Artists
Two- or four-year degree programs in fine arts exist throughout the United States, as well as two- and three-year professional schools that award certificates or associate degrees in design. Visual artists in the retail realm most frequently hold art degrees, with specializations in painting, sculpture, or photography. They are used to working with a variety of materials that they will most likely handle for window and in-store displays.
Others find degrees in theater design and art history very useful because they learn how to build stage sets-which these store, exhibits essentially are-and increase their facility with artistically historical themes and genres for highly specialized displays.
The rest of the preparation takes place on the job.
Educational Requirements for Fashion Publicists
A college education, combined with public relations experience usually achieved through an internship and work in the fashion sector, is considered excellent preparation for a career as a fashion publicist. Most students major in public relations, journalism, advertising, or communication.
Seen as a growing field, public relations is regarded as a degree -earning major at more than 200 colleges and about 100 graduate schools nationwide.
Common courses are public relations principles and techniques; management and administration, including organizational development; writing news releases, proposals, annual reports, scripts, and speeches; desktop publishing and computer graphics; and research, emphasizing survey design and implementation.
Most colleges are affiliated with firms that provide on-the-job internships, for which students apply and go through an extensive interviewing process. Some pay as well as give college course credit; while others just provide the course credit and an impressive addition to your resume.
How to Find Work as a Buyer or Sales Representative
In the personality-driven arena of fashion buying and selling, you can realistically get hired as a receptionist at a designer's showroom and work your way up to a managerial position. Nevertheless, a business degree can help your promotion immensely. Buyers frequently get their start in boutiques, and then pursue contacts within their city's large apparel marts, where they hook up with influential companies that can utilize their expertise.
For sales reps who work in showrooms, the first step up the fashion rung is sales supervisor or assistant sales manager. In bigger companies, becoming a regional manager is an early sign of success. Sales reps even become presidents of manufacturing firms. Others form their own companies and represent various manufacturers.
How to Find Work as a Fashion Trade Show and Events Organizer
Many special events planners are initially employed in the public relations field, where such activities are part of their overall promotional duties. Business degrees and sales/marketing experience are more common among fashion trade show/events organizers because their reach extends beyond publicity to selling their product to prospective exhibitors and clients.
Aspiring events planners often get involved in sporting events, or citywide festivals and fund-raisers, and work within the travel and hospitality industries to get well-rounded experience. Once they have mastered their organizational skills, special events planners can move into specific professions, such as fashion, where they can apply a winning formula to a specialized industry.
Because fashion shows are a lot like theater, taking directing courses and working part-time backstage with a community or professional acting troupe could certainly boost your know-how and credibility.
Steps to Owning a Boutique
If you have an entrepreneurial spirit combined with good fashion sense, owning a boutique could be very fulfilling and lucrative. Freedom to purchase and sell designs you believe will turn heads is especially gratifying. If you are also a designer, you have created a built-in means for marketing your collections. Expect to master the money management skills needed to run a business, along with the stamina to work seven days a week.
Most importantly, don't jump into self-employment unless you have done extensive research-from location to customer buying habits. If you set your sights high, take at least three years to strategically plan this highly risky, but exciting, career move. Because you will most likely be transferring your skills from working in the retail clothing/accessories sector to your own business, you must continue to perfect the skills necessary for being a successful and profitable store owner.
Once you have scouted out a prime location, determine how much remodeling is needed and how the rent will affect your overall profit. Meet with designers whose collections are unique but marketable. If you start stocking too many outrageous items, your customers may end up browsing, but not buying. Install the proper means of security, and get an up-to-date computer recordkeeping system.
You will also want to work with a visual artist to create appealing window displays, along with a spacious, comfortable environment. Never stop scouring fashion's inner circles for trends and innovative style ideas.
How to Find Work as a Fashion Window and Countertop Display Artist
Many visual merchandising artists don't start out in the clothing business. Instead, they work as graphic artists, scenic/prop designers, and even fine artists before discovering the world of retail. At that point, they may be assigned to create displays for the house wares or sporting goods department.
When they move up to the fashion arena, they are masters at integrating social and historical themes with the visual appeal of garments and their fascinating textures. Experience in various sides of the retail business prepares them for working with store managers and understanding the corporate chain of command. Although they have terrific ideas, visual managers are part of a team and must be able to take criticism and suggestions well, and to integrate others' ideas into an aesthetically pleasing whole.
How to Find Work as a Fashion Publicist
New York is probably the best place to start as a fashion publicist, because it remains the fashion capital of the world. The design industry may be tough to break into initially, so get experience by working at a public relations agency that serves fashion-related accounts. Or work as an account assistant in any field to perfect your writing and communication skills. Then keep your eyes and ears open for job leads.
In this business, you have to move quickly. So if Ralph Lauren is looking for an assistant to write advertising copy, go for it-even if the pay isn't that great in the beginning-to get your foot in the door. Small opportunities can lead to grand career possibilities.
A sensible place to apply would be the public relations departments of design schools or apparel centers. These areas would put you in touch with some of the top designers, retailers, and manufacturing firms. Large stores also have publicity departments, where you can get heavily involved in celebrity product promotions and grand openings.
Salary and Success Outlook: Buyers and Sales Representatives
Salaries for buyers and sales representatives follow similar patterns, and the two occupations rely on each other. A buyer, who works for a large firm, is paid a salary (starting in the twenties) with standard benefits provided by the employer.
Sales or "road" reps, who work independently, are paid on an exclusive commission basis, with the average commission rate of 6 to 10 percent of gross sales. This rate can get as high as 15 percent. Sales reps who work in showrooms receive a salary plus commissions. Because these reps enjoy the security of a weekly paycheck, their commissions are usually lower than those of "road" reps. In general, showroom reps for New York designers earn an annual starting salary in the high twenties.
Other perks include reimbursement for travel and car expenses, and discounts on the company's merchandise.
Growth in both professions is ongoing. Although the majority of buyers and sales reps work in New York, sales reps can also look for employment in other major United States apparel centers, such as Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Salary and Success Outlook: Fashion Trade Show and Events Organizers
Starting salaries are quite modest for newcomers to the event planning industry. Assistants earn less than $17,000 annually and must put in a hefty number of hours and years before reaching salaries in the seventies. If you are organizing a fashion show for top New York designers, and you have a viable track record, you can command fees that hover close to $100,000-especially if you own your own special event planning company.
Overall, however, salaries in managerial levels extend into the mid-forties, and opportunity for growth is outstanding in an industry that relies on such events to gain publicity and earn substantial profits.
Salary and Success Outlook: Boutique Owners
Because buying patterns shift radically depending on the economy, store owners encounter tremendously fluctuating incomes. The first two years in business are typically the most difficult because huge chunks of capital are invested in getting the store up and running. Once a visible profit surfaces by the third year, entrepreneurs can expect to stay in business-provided they continue to keep up with trends, maintain quality, and price their garments attractively.
It is realistic to expect to begin with a zero profit and escalate to six figures over the course of a few years. An increasing pattern in business is the rush toward self-employment. If you opt to have your own boutique, you won't be alone. To meet this demand, the government and associations within the fashion world have created various incentives, such as first-time business owner loans, for enterprising businesspeople.
Salary and Success Outlook:
Fashion Window and Countertop Display Artists
Employment in visual design occupations is expected to grow about as fast as the average for all occupations through the year 2005. Many openings will result from the need to replace those who leave the field. Growth in population and personal incomes is predicted to encourage increased demand for visual artists in the retail business. Median weekly earnings of experienced full-time designers in all fields of design average $600. The middle 50 percent earn between $400 and $900 a week. The bottom ten percent earn less than $300; and the top ten percent earn over $1,000 per week.
Salary and Success Outlook: Fashion Publicists
A College Placement Council salary survey indicated that new college graduates entering the public relations field were offered average starting salaries of about $21,000. Median annual salaries of all public relations account executives range from $28,000 in agencies to $40,000 in corporations. Some highly successful publicists earn considerably more, in the mid-seventies.
Competition among recent college graduates for public relations positions is expected to continue, as the number of applicants will most likely exceed the number of job openings. Degrees are essential, especially in the majors of communication, journalism, public relations, and advertising. People without the appropriate educational background or work experience will face the toughest obstacles in finding a public relations job.
Due to the downsizing of major corporations, including those in the fashion world, many public relations specialists are branching out on their own and contracting their services to top clients. Here the competition is fierce than ever.
