September 2024 – FASH330 Merchandise Planning

FASH330 Exclusive Interview with Natalie Kaucic, Global Merchant for Dockers at Levi Strauss & Co.

About Natalie Kaucic

Natalie Kaucic is a Merchandising professional currently in the role of Global Merchant for Dockers Men’s Tops at Levi Strauss & Co. She graduated from the University of Delaware in 2019 with a Fashion Merchandising Degree and Business Admin minor. During her studies, she was awarded the Fashion Scholarship Fund scholarship, studied at John Cabot in Rome, participated in the Disney College Program, and was a leader for the Delaware Diplomats. Natalie’s research on the global market for sustainable apparel was published in Just-style, a leading fashion industry trade publication. Post university, Natalie started as an assistant at Minted as a Merchandiser, where she worked in the Wedding category and faced the adverse challenges of the wedding industry during COVID-19. Levi’s was her next endeavor where she started as an assistant, and has since been promoted to run the Dockers Men’s Tops Category for the Globe.

Disclaimer: The comments and opinions expressed below are solely my own and do not reflect the views or opinions of any company.

Question 1: What are your primary job responsibilities as a global merchant? What does a typical day or week look like for you? Which part of the job do you find most exciting? Were there any aspects of the position that surprised you after you started?

Natalie: My primary responsibility is to create a brand-right and consumer-focused product assortment. Under the covers, this looks like a vast variety of tasks that I do on a seasonal basis. I regularly listen and work with regional merchandising to understand their regional specific needs, collaborate with design on new product ideas and fabrics, and meet with product development to work on new fabric innovations and product costing. Every week looks dramatically different for me in my work. Sometimes, I’m heads down in assortment strategy; other weeks, I work on creating templates and calendars for process improvement.

What I find most exciting is seeing the product in person. Most Dockers Tops are not sold domestically, so it’s really fun to see a product you worked on in the wild! I am also grateful to be able to manage an assistant. Seeing things click for her and watching her succeed is incredibly motivating.

What surprised me the most was the number of different teams I work with, including planning, regional merchants, product development, marketing, styling, design, garment/fit development, copy, IT, analytics, sales, business operations, and e-commerce. Learning what everyone does and who to go to was the most significant learning curve and the biggest shock coming into my role.

Question 2: Based on your observation and experience, how do the merchandising, product development, and sourcing teams collaborate in a fashion apparel company? Could you explain their respective responsibilities and how they support one another?

Natalie: In my role, I have more direct contact with our product development team than the sourcing team. I work very closely with product development as they are the team that helps produce our product. They manage fabric & garment development, costing negotiations, and innovation development/testing. They also work through some more micro-sourcing strategies, for example, moving the production from one factory to another to get better duty rates. As a hypothetical example, we sell a poplin shirt primarily in Europe. Pretend we produce the shirt in India at a cost of $10/each. However, shipping it to Europe incurs a 40% import duty, bringing the cost of goods sold (COGS) to $14. If we could produce the shirt in Mexico, where the duty rate to Europe is only 5%, even if the production cost is higher—say $12—the overall cost to Europe would still be lower. There are endless complexities to this that I’m sure you will learn more from FASH455—topics like free trade agreements, yarn forward rules of origin, etc.

Question 3: Fashion companies need to balance various factors such as cost, quality, speed to market, and compliance risks when deciding where to source their apparel products. Could you share your experiences and reflections on managing these challenges in the real world?

Natalie: Below is an example of natural fibers and the cost challenge with cotton-forward apparel products.

Currently, linen is in high demand, but there isn’t enough crop to meet industry needs—it’s a classic case of supply and demand. Not only does this drive up costs (COGS), but it also complicates the process of securing raw materials. It’s easy to overlook that the apparel industry is fundamentally tied to agriculture, making it vulnerable to factors like bad weather, natural disasters, and inaccurate demand forecasting. These challenges force us to make critical decisions. With rising garment costs, should the company absorb the expense to keep prices steady for consumers? Our product development team might ask if we need to pre-book fibers to lock in pricing—when is the right time to do that, and how much should we purchase?

This isn’t a new challenge. For example, cotton, our primary raw material for clothing, fluctuates in price like oil, making agility in sourcing essential!

Question 4: Studies show that consumers want to see more “sustainable apparel products” in stores. How are fashion companies responding to this demand? What opportunities and challenges does this trend present for fashion companies’ business operations, especially in merchandising, supply chain, and sourcing?

Natalie: This is such a complicated question. I think about this often as I am personally really passionate about this topic!

In my day-to-day work, I focus on sustainable fibers, as the fabric content of a garment is something I can directly influence. Working on a global scale, I collaborate with regions worldwide, each of which—along with their retailers—has different values regarding sustainable products. Europe, for instance, is relatively ahead of the US in sustainability and often requires a certain percentage of sustainable fibers (e.g., organic cotton, recycled cotton) in our products. In Europe, items using 100% organic cotton hold significant value and can command a higher price in stores such as Galeries Lafayette or Zalando. However, not all retailers and consumers globally share the same commitment to sustainability. In some cases, we may need to use synthetics for functional purposes, such as in activewear. In those instances, we prioritize using recycled polyester or nylon to meet our sustainability goals. Regardless of the consumer or price point, our goal is to integrate sustainability at every level and for every product.

One challenge I find particularly interesting is working with “recycled cotton.” As you may know, recycling cotton typically involves breaking down the fibers, which shortens and weakens them. Because of this, there’s usually a limit to how much recycled cotton can be used before fabric quality is affected. That’s why you often see recycled cotton blended with virgin cotton in the same garment. However, newer recycling methods that aim to preserve the staple length are emerging, offering hope for improvements as the technology becomes more mature and accessible.

Ultimately, heavy consumption, regardless of the fabric being recycled or organic, isn’t truly sustainable. The focus should be on choosing pieces you love and investing in items that are made to last.

Question 5: Are there any other major trends in the fashion industry that we should closely monitor in the next 1-3 years?

Natalie: In the next 1-3 years, I’m eager to see what AI-driven tools will be introduced to assist merchants in making smarter, data-backed decisions. In merchandising, we are constantly trying to predict the future. A lot of research and data analysis go into decision making, but also a big handful of going with your gut. Will AI be able to help us find trends in the past that can better help us make decisions for the future?

It’s not exactly a trend, but I’m really curious about the future of fast fashion giants over the next decade. With growing interest in sustainability and new regulations emerging from Europe, will we eventually see a decline in these dominant players, or will demand for fast, cheap apparel always persist?

Question 6: Last but not least, anything you learned from FASH courses that you find particularly relevant and helpful in your career? What advice would you offer current students preparing for a career in the fashion apparel industry?

Natalie: I felt really prepared coming out of the FASH program for my corporate job. I picked this degree, as I’m sure many have because it combined the necessary key concepts of a business degree with the skills and knowledge to build a career in apparel. I think the classes I reference the most in my day-to-day life are product development classes, textile classes, and apparel buying. As a merchant, I need to be able to talk about fabric types with designers, cost engineering with product developers, and financial metrics with planners.

When it comes to advice, it’s tried and true: network! Talk to teachers, reach out to alumni, sign up for the UD Job Shadow Program, and talk to the career center. There are so many services to take advantage of while at UD. Other than networking, I would highly recommend steering the subjects of your papers to companies and topics you are interested in. I worked on a few reports about Levi Strauss & Co., which confirmed it as a target company for me and helped me succeed in the interview process.

Lastly, be flexible! You might come in, as I did, thinking you want to be a buyer, only to realize it’s not the best fit. Or, you could start with greeting cards and stationery merchandising and pivot to apparel. Or even move out of apparel entirely! Nothing is set in stone, and that’s both the most stressful yet reassuring lesson I’ve learned since graduating.

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FASH330 Exclusive Interview with Camryn Leon-Kelly, E-commerce Coordinator at Birkenstock

About Camryn Leon-Kelly

Hello Blue Hens! My name is Camryn Leon-Kelly, and I graduated from the University of Delaware in 2019 with a degree in Fashion Merchandising and Management. I currently live in Manhattan, and I love all things related to art, fashion, and interior design. I am presently the e-commerce coordinator for Birkenstock. Before working for Birkenstock, I had various e-commerce and merchandising roles with Martha Stewart, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Rebecca Minkoff. I am extremely grateful for my education and experience at the University of Delaware. I can confidently say that I apply skills that I learned at UD every single day!

Question 1: What are your primary job responsibilities as an E-commerce Coordinator? What does a typical day or week look like for you? Which part of the job do you find most exciting? Were there any aspects of the position that surprised you after you started?

Camryn: As the e-commerce coordinator, my primary responsibility is to ensure that Birkenstock’s e-commerce sites have a seamless and positive customer experience. The beauty of e-commerce is that no day looks the same!

Our team meets with our merchandising counterparts weekly to design our homepage for the week. In these meetings, we review selling, upcoming product launches, and various e-commerce-related analytics. Once our homepage is designed and created in our systems, I am responsible for merchandising the products featured across the site in multiple categories. I also manage site merchandising across our sites for advertising, emails, and social media. Merchandising products into their respective categories on our site is extremely important to our customer’s online shopping experience. It is crucial for our customers to be able to find new products that are being messaged while also being able to see our bestselling styles very easily.

I love being able to merchandise products on the site not only based on data and analytics but also on trends that I am seeing. Examples of this could be noticing that people are wearing a particular style and or color in the streets of Manhattan and then merchandising this product to areas of our site for easy access.

I also manage the product launches for Birkenstock. Every season, I work with our counterparts in Germany on our item-set-up process. This process looks at reviewing all product imagery and copying and QA-ing all our product detail pages to ensure that every style is correctly set up on the front end of our site. One of my favorite parts of my role is working with our product and being able to play such an integral part in our business by pushing our product live on our sites! It is so cool and exciting to see people wearing products I have worked on in real life, like knowing they bought them on our site! Every time I go outside in NYC, I see people in Birkenstocks.

Lastly, I create and design monthly campaigns for Birkenstock USA and Birkenstock Canada. Our campaigns are creative landing pages that showcase editorial images while also showcasing new styles for the season. Monthly, our merchandising team creates merchandising stories for me to create campaigns. These campaigns include new products, color stories, brand collaborations, and holiday campaigns. Creating campaigns is my favorite part of my job! It is the perfect combination of e-commerce and merchandising! It allows me to be creative while utilizing my merchant skills to create successful campaigns.

I was surprised to learn how helpful my merchandising background has been in this role. Prior to my roles at Birkenstock, I had been in the buying and merchandising world for brick-and-mortar stores. It was not until my time at Martha Stewart that I was able to focus entirely on e-commerce. Once I started shifting from merchandising to e-commerce, I realized I wanted to pivot from buying and merchandising to e-commerce. Although I pivoted from the more traditional buying and merchandising world, I was pleasantly surprised that the experience and knowledge I gained in my prior roles have made me highly successful in the e-commerce space because I can make decisions from a merchant’s perspective.

Question 2: Before joining BIRKENSTOCK, you were a Merchandise Assistant for another leading U.S. fashion retailer. Based on your experience, how does merchandising differ between brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce businesses, and what are the similarities? Particularly, what are the critical merchandising issues for e-commerce?

Camryn: Before my time at Birkenstock, after graduating from the University of Delaware, I was a Merchandise Assistant for Saks Fifth Avenue. This was a fantastic entry-level job, because I was able to gain buying and merchandising experience while also learning what it means to work for such a large company like Saks Fifth Avenue. I worked under the women’s private label department for Saks Off Fifth, and at the time, the company was primarily focused on their brick-and-mortar stores. It was a great time to be at Off Fifth because the company was just beginning to really invest in its e-commerce presence. This was a fantastic opportunity to gain experience in buying and merchandising for both retail channels. I quickly learned that the merchandising strategies were very different for each channel. Like many buying roles, our team would utilize sales information to determine what products we would design and or buy into for the next season. We would also determine how much inventory should be allocated for our brick-and-mortar stores or our site.

Inventory and weeks of supply are important metrics to look at in both channels. Still, for e-commerce it is crucial to look at inventory levels because when a product is sold out on a site the customer can see if the product is sold out on the product detail page immediately. In contrast, in a physical store, a customer may not even be aware that a specific color/size or style is sold out until they physically look for the product. Additionally, we could pinpoint the differences between our e-commerce and brick-and-mortar customers by reviewing sales data. Another difference between both channels is that e-commerce moves a lot faster than brick & mortar. E-commerce sites are updated almost daily to push new products, merchandising stories and promotions, whereas changes happen less frequently in the physical brick-and-mortar stores. Most brands update their site’s homepages weekly to create enticing content for their customers to interact with.

The biggest similarity between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce is that the mission to create the best customer experience exists in both channels! The end goal in both channels is to successfully meet sales plan while bringing our customers the best experience at our stores or on our site.

Challenges in Ecommerce

Although the global supply chain crisis has improved tremendously through the past few years, the most challenging part of e-commerce or brick and mortar merchandising will always be securing the product in our warehouses in a timely fashion for upcoming launches. The industry has still not full recovered from COVID and the supply chain crisis.

Additionally, since e-commerce is strongly rooted in technology, there is always new technology to utilize and learn in the space to create new experiences on the site.

Question 3: It is said that fashion merchandising involves both “arts” and “sciences.” What is your view based on your real-world experiences?

Camryn: I believe that fashion merchandising perfectly combines the arts and sciences. My love for the arts and my desire to be creative have allowed me to be successful in every role I have had in the industry. I am constantly reading industry news and competitive shopping to educate myself on new brands, trends and products! It is so important to be aware of upcoming trends, industry news, and cultural moments in the industry.

A misconception about most roles in the industry is that they are all data and math-driven, but there is an art to analyzing data. Although buying and merchandising roles are traditionally centered around analyzing data, you have to be creative to understand the “why” a product is doing well or “where” a trend is coming from. As someone who struggled with math throughout their educational experience, I can confidently say that the formulas and skills I learned in FASH330 have applied to all of my roles in the industry!

Question 4: In your view, what “big factors” or industry trends could significantly affect fashion companies’ merchandising practices in the next 1-3 years, particularly for e-commerce businesses?

Camryn: As mentioned earlier, there is a strong connection between e-commerce and technology, and most of the industry trends that I see affecting the industry are technology-related. Across the industry, artificial intelligence (AI) and constantly evolving technology are among the big factors of change. For example, in the future, site merchants could utilize AI to help merchandise products across their sites based on findings from the AI tool. Systems already combine sales data and e-commerce metrics to allow merchants to merchandise their sites.

Before the pandemic, there was a strong shift in consumer behavior where consumers preferred shopping online instead of in brick-and-mortar stores. This shift intensified during and after the pandemic. Many brick-and-mortar stores could not recover from the pandemic, and online shopping became the preferred way for most consumers. Due to this shift in consumer behavior, there is a desire for a unique and personalized experience in e-commerce. I have noticed a desire for personalization regarding the e-commerce experience. Examples of personalization technology in the e-commerce space include virtual try-ons, live chat capacities with customer service, and live shipping updates.

Another factor of change I am noticing in the space is the integration of content and commerce. Celebrity collaborations and brand collaborations create not only new creative opportunities but it also allows for brands to access new customers. During my time at Birkenstock, I have supported and launched multiple collaborations and created the landing pages for them on our site! There is infinite opportunity with brand collaborations.

Question 5: Reflecting on your career journey in the merchandising world, what skill sets do you find most essential and why? What advice would you give to current students preparing for a career in fashion merchandising or the fashion industry in general?

Camryn: The University of Delaware has prepared me to be successful in all the roles I have had in the industry so far. From my first day at Saks to my current role with Birkenstock, I have constantly been using skills I learned during my time as a student in the FASH department at UD.

When starting any role in any part of the industry, it is important not to be afraid to ask any questions! I would also treat the first days of a new role like the first weeks of a new class, take lots of notes, ask questions and do not be afraid to ask for help! It can be extremely overwhelming to start a role and not know what anyone is talking about! I remember making myself a glossary with buzzwords, formulas, and common phrases. Trust me, no one on their first day knows the system names or even what “PO” stands for (Purchase Order).

Additionally, learning does not have to stop after graduation! My most successful peers in the industry are constantly learning. You can continue your education on the industry in small ways such as reading industry news, keeping up to date on the latest trends via paying attention to streetwear, and simply following your favorite brands on social media to watch how their brands evolve. Knowledge is truly the key of success, and the fashion industry is constantly evolving and it is crucial to be aware of all the trends within the industry and the culture.

Lastly, my biggest piece of advice is to be open to change! There is a lot of pressure and romanticization around being a buyer or being in a role that is centered around buying and merchandising. There are so many other amazing roles in the industry that could be a better fit for you! Although I began my career in a very traditional buying and merchandising role, I am so grateful that I can explore the world of e-commerce!

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