First Daze

I feel so grateful to be a Ralph Lauren Intern! It's only day two (technically) and I've already learned so much from Cynthia. She is such a great teacher and mentor-- I couldn't have asked to shadow anyone better! Now, I'll go on to talk about what I learned on Day 1 and Day 2!


Day 1


We started the day with going over numbers, lots of them. Cynthia guided us through all the acronyms, percentages, colors, and such. We then got the tour of Polo Ralph Lauren- Men's and Children's Department. I learned all sorts of fun things like what it means to be a Flagship and Tier 1-4 store. Flagship stores make over a million a year. Tier 1 stores make between $700,000 and a million a year and Tier 2 makes between $500,000 and $700,000 a year, and so on and so forth. Crabtree happens to make enough to be considered a Flagship store. I'm not exactly sure what I can and cannot disclose so I'll keep numbers vague.


We learned a lot of vocabulary the first day, one for example (my favorite) is "jelly bean". "Jelly beaning" is a Ralph Lauren term that means to put contrasting colors adjacent to each other to make a visual pop. This makes their iconic wall of shirts, well, iconic. They do not use a monochromatic method to display their clothes in order to avoid making their colors look "muddy". Many acronyms flew around the first day, too. I am grateful my schooling at NC State has provided me experience with many of the terms like POS, WTD, etc. This makes the whole process a lot easier, now I just need to retain the new acronyms like BSS, BSR, GSO, STD...(the list goes on)!


Oh, and I learned how to fold clothes. Lots of clothes.


Day 2


The night before, Cynthia sent recaps of last weeks sales in Crabtreee and Charlottesville and the Polo Weekly Selling report. This is where the COT at NCSU has really helped; I was able to read most of the reports and make educated guesses about some seemingly random numbers and acronyms. After Cynthia explained what the reports meant, I had a clearer view on what it meant to the company. We learned what items in the Crabtree store were trending downward. In order to increase sales, we went out to the floor and brainstormed how to position the clothing in a better way to drive sales. I can't wait to see the numbers! It will be a great feeling, a very satisfying one, if I see the numbers next week and they are better because of the positioning of the items.