Thrive in Fashion Buying and Merchandising

What Fashion Buyers Can Learn From Merchandisers

In this episode of the Thrive in Fashion Buying podcast, Elisabeth explains how to think more like a merchandiser, so you can read what is behind a result before you deci

How Fashion Buyers Handle Difficult Conversations

Once you have a few years of buying behind you, the hardest part of the job is rarely the product or the numbers. It is getting your range decisions through the business

Buying Decisions in a Soft Market

When a market goes soft, the instinct is to assume demand has disappeared. It usually hasn't. Your customer is still there, but she's taking longer to decide, buying one

What to do when your margin drops

What do you do when your sales are on plan but your margin has dropped. In this episode Elisabeth explains why that happens, what it tells you about the quality of your s

How to Review a Poor-Performing Fashion Range

When a range underperforms, the initial assumption is almost always that the product was wrong. It sometimes is. In this episode, Elisabeth goes through the small number

Q&A's - OTB, Late Deliveries, Range Plans ..

There are lots of questions in buying that are left unanswered. In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale answers some of those directly: these are questions that come up repea

What Makes the Buyer-Merchandiser Relationship Work

The relationship between buying and merchandising influences how a season performs..  It is not always obvious but when it works well it shows in the way decisions are m

How to Develop Your Fashion Buying Career

Professional development in Fashion Buying is largely self-directed. Most organisations do not have a structured approach to developing their buyers, and the ones who wai

What Nobody Tells You About Your First Year as a Fashion Buyer

  In this episode: - Why most buying offices run on an undesigned apprenticeship model. - The most important professional relationship to build it deliberately from th

I Have Hired Hundreds of Fashion Buyers. This Is What Makes a CV Stand Out

Most fashion buyer CVs share the same problem: they read like a job description. They list responsibilities, use business jargon, and tell what a buyer was supposed to do

How Fashion Buying for Digital Commerce Is Different and the Skills You Need to Do It Well

In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale looks at what buying for digital commerce genuinely requires across traditional e-commerce, drops and limited releases, and marketplac

Why Fashion Buyers Struggle with Sustainability

Sustainability is an increasingly important topic in fashion retail, and one of the least clearly defined. In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale cuts through the noise to g

What AI Is Actually Doing to the Fashion Buyer's Role (And How to Stay Ahead of It)

AI is moving into fashion retail fast, and buying teams are already feeling it. In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale looks at what AI tools are useful for in the buying pr

Why the Best Fashion Buyers Are Not Afraid to Say They Got It Wrong

Every fashion buyer makes wrong calls. The question is not whether it happens but instead what you do when it does. In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale talks about gettin

What I Look for When I Review a Fashion Buyer's Performance

Fashion college teaches you how to buy. It does not teach you how to be assessed as a professional in a commercial business. In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale explains

How Fashion Buyers can succeed at Supplier Negotiations

Supplier negotiation is one of the most commercially significant skills a fashion buyer develops and one area where limiting habits can form early. In this episode, Elisa

The Seasonal Planning Mistakes Fashion Buyers Keep Making

Seasonal planning is one of the most important technical skills a fashion buyer develops and one of the areas where the most avoidable mistakes happen. In this episode, E

What Fashion Buyers Get Wrong About Range Reviews

Range review and Range Sign off meetings are one of the most commercially significant meetings in the buyers calender. In this episode, Elisabeth Mac Hale draws on 25+ ye

How Fashion Buyers Build a Reputation for Strategic Thinking Before the Promotion Comes

Most mid-level buyers are waiting for a promotion to make them strategic. In this episode, Elisabeth explains why that is the wrong order and what the specific, observabl

Why Fashion Buyers Struggle to Push Back at Work (And What to Do Instead)

Most buyers at the three to five year stage in their careers know when they should push back. The challenge is knowing how to do this in a way that is commercially useful