A day in the life of… a fashion buyer Sisters Jenny Plant and Claire Wright own Stripes Fashion & Beauty on The Foregate. Buying ahead is a vital part of their job, long before we see the items on their rails in-store.
9.00 am We catch a train to London and grab breakfast en route as we look through trend forecasts and previous season’s brand and product performances. We discuss the direction we want to take the store in, our budget for each brand and what we hope we will see at the showrooms.
We visit London showrooms twice in any season to view our brands’ collections with their UK sales team. We also visit a number of trade fairs all over the UK and abroad each year to source new and unique products and for inspiration. We buy our collections six months before they are delivered to store so it’s important to spot emerging trends and trade shows are great way of viewing lots of collections in one day. Our favourite shows are
in Copenhagen and Paris as there are usually lots of interesting upand-coming labels there. The job of being a fashion buyer is challenging but we love the fact that every season we are able to start afresh and re-think our collections. Buying requires a lot of time looking at product spreadsheets and sellthrough figures and a little bit of guesswork but it is a wonderful job and as sisters working together we have a lot of fun! 10.30 am We arrive in London and head to our first appointment – the showrooms are located all over London and vary in size from one sales agent in a single label showroom to huge, multilabel showrooms. We look through many rails of clothing, view lookbooks and brand presentations and view key pieces and bestselling items on a model. We can then quickly edit the collection into a capsule that will suit our Stripes’ customers. We work from samples, lookbooks and colour cards to create a collection