New season is starting! Now everyone is already busy preparing for Resort 20. Design team already starts doing some sample making and design development of the new collection while product development team is busy looking for fabrics and finding suppliers. Because Product Development team only has one intern, as a result, when the intern can’t come for some reasons they will have no one to help them. Like today, their intern couldn’t come but they have a lot of works to do, so my manager let me help product development team with their jobs.
I was given tasks to collect all the information of the fabrics especially about the price and if they are eco friendly or not. Once I have already got the information I need to write the price on each sample but I really need to ensure that I don’t mix up the price and the fabrics, as it would be fatal. In terms of the price and costing, I also need to calculate the numbers as the price will goes up and down depending on how much fabric they are going to buy. For example; if suppliers give the price £10/meters of one fabric for 140 meters, and add 30% extra for less than 50 meters and 20% extra for above 50 but under 140 meters, so we will have the price; £10/meters for 140 meters, £12/ meters for <140 meters, and £13/meters for<50 meters. It is actually not a really hard calculation, however, as they have about 100 samples to sort out it makes me need to calculate a lot of numbers.
The calculation that I did was aim to ease the manager in doing product costing and decide how many meters should they buy for the collection. It felt so different for me dealing with a lot of numbers again after a while. But then again, it was a really nice experience. I learnt a lot from this especially about the quality of fabric, price and kind of the criteria of expensive and cheap fabric. After dealing quite a lot with fabric, I kind of enjoy it more and more. I feel like I am enjoying it more than dealing with pattern cutting, which I love to do the most before I started my placement. Hopefully my knowledge in fabric will help me a lot in my final year when I do my own collection.