Fashion was always such an elusive idea to me when I was growing up, probably because most the media I consumed never really represented the environment I was in and rarely did any of the campaigns of the most revered brands exemplify people who looked like me. Watching haute couture shows on Fashion TV and movies like The Devil Wears Prada was about the closest I thought I would ever get to having any kind of insight into the realm of fashion.
I grew up in a humble home in Windhoek, Namibia and it’s still crazy to me that I’ve had the opportunity to pursue a career in fashion over the last 10 years, I often have moments of sheer awe that life led me here – into this world that once felt so inaccessible to my younger self. After graduating high school, my sense of direction became blurry, and I felt plagued by the expectation to follow what seemed like the only acceptable paths into medicine, law or finance. I knew I wanted something different and at the time I had no notion of what that even meant. In hindsight, it was so progressive of my mother who encouraged me to apply for a fashion course at the Manchester Fashion Institute – I distinctly remember her pointing out, “you love business and fashion”, and it never crossed my mind that those worlds could collide so seamlessly at an intersection called Fashion Buying and Merchandising.
In a snapshot, the apparel and textile industry is one of the world’s largest industries driving quite a substantial part of the global economy valued at 1.7 trillion dollars in 2021 in a report by Euromonitor. The common assumption of anyone who works in fashion is often that they’re a designer or a marketeer, when in fact, the value chain of the industry is much wider and more expansive than that. It takes an army to idealize even just a single style from concept to consumer, that cycle requires multiple counterparts from designers and buyers to manufacturers and suppliers. So, it comes as no surprise to me that the industry is quite literally an economic engine with a significant impact on matters relating to the global socio-economic sphere.
The principles of my role as a fashion merchandiser are simple – the age-old mantra of the practice is to get “the right product, at the right place, at the right time”, the mechanics of this, however, are slightly more complex than the saying suggests. A recent report by McKinsey & Company highlighted that the umbrella term of “merchandising” covers a range of skills necessary to achieve retail excellence – of which include expertise on products, consumer behaviors and demands, distribution channeling, timing, pricing, promotions and style replenishment methods. Needless to say, merchandising is an art of such that involves a similar acuity required to build a puzzle – placing all the right pieces together to create the final picture.
Over the years my career in fashion merchandising has developed so much more in me than a keen sense of business acumen and has brought a new meaning to the idea of value creation. As an industry, the world of fashion hosts a vast array of opportunities where ‘creatives’, financial experts, garments workers and logisticians, to name a few, coexist and collaborate closely in the idealization of a product. The State of Fashion report in 2017 found that if the global fashion industry was ranked alongside individual countries GDP, it would represent the 7th largest economy in the world – and yet, its significance is still not fully recognized today. This is noticeable on different scales, whether through the lack of recognition given to the credibility of pursuing a career path in fashion or in the lack of official responsible policies and regulations in the industry. Value creation is generically defined as the process of turning labour and resources into something that meets the needs of others – what this definition doesn’t take into consideration is the needs of those in the labor force or the impact on the resources necessary to create the product. Initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015 remain a fundamental foundation in driving conversations about impact forward, as stated in their definition – the 17 SDG’s take on an integrated approach highlighting that action in one area will affect outcomes in others and that development should balance social, economic and environmental sustainability. The idea that anything that holds influence, great or small, should equally be held at that esteem by recognizing both its value and impact is a viewpoint that is yet to be assumed globally when it comes to the fashion industry.
As a fashion merchandiser, you’re tasked with the planning, selection and distribution of a collection and thereafter, using data analytics to measure its success in order to strategize for the future collections. One of the reasons I fell in love with the role was because, in order to reach the most optimal results in this process – it generally requires a tremendous amount of collaboration and cocreation with various stakeholders, it’s given me the ultimate gift of perspective of the significance of every role and every person in the chain. In the same breath, the industry has undoubtedly gained a reputation of being notoriously ‘bad’ from the wasteful nature of product development cycles, the lack of inclusivity that can be experienced on a wide spectrum and the denunciation of workforces in poor working conditions. It’s absolutely necessary to recognize that in spite of its reputation, this economic power can be used to fuel so much more good than we recognize.
In Seetal Solanki’s, Why Design Matters, she explores the power of materials to transcend the boundaries of different disciplines and perfectly highlights that we are moving into a world where the challenges and needs we are trying to address are too complicated for experts in any one single subject and at any single scale to resolve. It just so happens that the fashion industry is already built on a system that inherently requires a diverse array of skillsets to keep it running, much like Solanki’s viewpoint on materials, the fashion industry can actually act as a catalyst to bring diverse groups of people from multiple disciplines together to paint a different narrative on social influence – one that recognizes the industry’s tremendous capacity to affect social, economic and environmental matters on a global scale and creatively define better ways to meet societies ever-present sartorial needs .
My pursuit of a career in fashion wasn’t always acknowledged as a worthwhile path to take and even in the question of its credibility. I’d choose this path all over again. And, while my role as a merchandiser might only be a small branch in the value chain of an entire fashion ecosystem, it’s one I’d like to approach more responsibly and consciously going forward.
