*Blue Nile Clothing Suppliers

I am doing a two week placement at Blue Nile Clothing next week so I popped by yesterday to talk to the Head of the Technical Department - Helen Rice.

She told me that they supply for Lipsy, River Island and ASOS and showed me some of their new lines going into stores next week.

Blue Nile supply ASOS with their Petite and Tall ranges - of course this caught my interest.
Helen told me that the standard reduction of length for ASOS petite is 3cm. They either take of 1 cm from the top and 2cm from the bottom or 1 cm from the top, 1 cm from the middle and 1cm from the bottom. This was interesting as in my previous blog post about petite sizing I mentioned that ASOS does not state on their website how many centimetres they shorten their petite garments by (See blog post: http://hmpeti-ti.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/size-guide-comp-shop.html).

An issue that they sometimes have is that petite women can sometimes have a longer torso than legs - so even when they reduce the length by 3 cm, the legs may still be too long and the body too short etc.

Unfortunately I couldn't take any pictures inside because of their samples for different retailers. 

*FRA Mock Shop - Floor Plan and Merchandising Research

Took some pictures of the FRA mock shop for my floor space and merchandising section.

As I have quite a lot of options in my ranges I need quite a lot of floor space. The FRA mock shop is 20 metres by 20 metres which looked big enough for my range...but I might go a little bigger.

I also looked at the rails to estimate my store linear metres and options per linear metre (about 40 - 50 options).

*Garment Construction

I found another book on garment construction which also helped me with the gathered skirt I am doing for my Buyers Pack section.
I have posted pictures of the measurement page and a page on how to created gathered details.

*Brand Strategy Winners & Sinners

In March I visited H&M to do a Comp Shop for our River Island project.

Those pictures were also handy for my INP as I was able to compare the stock between March and May and compare what was still in stock, what was sold out and what had been marked down.

As you can see the trend that was prevalent in March was the 70's theme.
Compared to the pics I took a few weeks ago the 70's trend has died down and H&M are now stocking more summer/holiday fashion (see previous post:http://hmpeti-ti.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/hm-floor-plan.html)

These items are on sale in store or online

WINNERS - When I went back to H&M in May, these items were either completely sold out or some sizes were sold out online or in store.

*HM Floor Plan - Floor Plan & Merchandising Research

I need to do a planogram and sales plan for my INP.

For that I went to two different H&M stores (Oxford Street and Regent's Street) to take pictures of their floor plan and how many options they have hanging and folded, as well as the types of rails/fixtures they use. My planograms will be based on the H&M fixtures and rails in these photo's.

As you can see H&M puts between 5-10 (sometimes more than 10) units per option on a rail.