Summer in the City

My First Day!

Today was my first day at Calvin Klein Jeans. I arrived at the Warnaco building, 501 7^th Ave, at 9:30 AM and met with Hoa, the human resources coordinator. She took me to the 15^th floor and introduced me to my team: Aubrey, Kelly, and Kristen, the merchandising team for the men’s division. Kristen helped me set up my desk, email, and internet, and after a quick tour of the floor, I jumped right in.

The first thing Kristen had me work on was updating the “Injection Books”. The book holds product spec sheets of all items added to the line after the initial components have been determined. While we were putting the injection books together she showed me how the style numbers work. We updated the books for both Holiday 2006 and Spring 2007.

Next, I got to take a little field trip to Macy’s. Gayle, the VP of Merchandising, said she had seen a pair of shorts, the “Freighter Short”, in the Polo Jeans section that she thought would be a good inspiration for the design team. So I was off to the 7^th Ave Building of Macy’s, company credit card in hand. After looking at every short in the department and asking two sales associates, I still hadn’t found the mystery short. After calling back to the office it turns out Gayle couldn’t remember quite what they looked like or if that was even the name of them, so I came back to the office.

After I arrived back I helped Kristen sort out some samples to send to the PR department. The PR department will use these samples to send to magazines, photoshoots, etc. We went through two boxes and I read her the style number and we typed up a list of everything in the boxes, style number and description.

After a quick break for lunch, I got a very short tour of the showroom on the 14^th floor. I couldn’t see too much of the showroom because there were a lot of meetings going on, but from what I saw I was very impressed.

Next Kristen gave me some weekly sales reports from the past three weeks. From these I highlighted any style that had over 5% sell through in that week. After highlighting I had to copy, clip, and deliver them to Gayle and Aubrey.

Lastly, I browsed various websites for images of “cool” men’s shorts for the design team to use as inspiration for next summer. I found several images and compiled them into a Word document. After I printed that I was done for the day at 5:00.

I loved my first day. I met a lot of people, including the two interns in the women’s department. The one girl, Brooke, is a business major at University of Florida, and we really hit it off. I already felt like a was a part of the team, especially since I have my own desk, email address, and extension. Everyone was friendly and welcoming, and they all seem to work well together and seem to be friends. For example, they had a mini birthday party for one of the girls complete with cake and singing, and made plans to go to a movie tomorrow. This is exactly the kind of environment I want to work in after I graduate, and I think this summer is going to be a blast.

posted by Jessica @ 7:06 PM