-: My name is Lindsay Sword.
I'm the Vice President of Merchandising at Tommy Hilfiger.
I'm responsible for all of the product
that we develop for North America.
Merchandising is a career in which you
are creating product,
specifically in my case, clothing, handbags,
hats, for customers.
And I'm responsible for developing that product
through the lens of our brand and our target customer.
Each season I have to decide what clothing we want
to make to sell.
So my job is to look at our past sales,
market trends, and the competition,
what other stores, what other brands are doing,
and decide what we want our design team
to design for that season.
I give them a road map
essentially asking for them to make me
shirts, pants, jackets, shorts,
everything that you can think of of that you would wear,
and then I work with them throughout the process
as they sketch, as we get samples,
and then as we decide what we want
to give our sales teams to sell,
we work on that development together.
Then my job to edit the final collection,
set it up in a show room,
teach our sales teams about the collection,
and then support them when they go into
what we call market, which is bringing
all of their accounts into our offices
and our showrooms, showing them the collection,
and trying to get them to buy as much as possible
from us for them to sell
to their customers in their stores.
Each week, my team, along with the sales teams,
are looking at how our product is performing in stores.
We get sales reports, and we talk to those companies
and stores themselves to understand
the customer loves that striped polo
from last month's collection,
but they really don't like this t-shirt.
And we'll use that information,
as well as a lot of analytics and data
from our different systems
to understand what our customer is responding to
and what they don't like.
And that informs what we design
and develop for the following season.
We travel to around the country to our stores,
to see how our product and brand
is showing up to the customer.
We also travel overseas for inspiration and research,
to understand what's happening from a trend perspective,
and also what's happening in your
market segments across the globe.