Accomplishment 1: Building Relationship

Accomplishment #1: Building Relationships.

My first job was as a retail buyer for one of the largest fast fashion retailers in the world. It was my dream job! On my first day, the training manager began with the following words: Fast fashion is about taking designs from the runway to the racks at the lowest price possible as quickly as possible. If you want to survive here, you need to push your emotions to the side. Do not build relationships with vendors. If one vendor does not agree to our terms, there are hundreds of others that will. Everybody wants to work with us. If you cannot keep up, there are hundreds of others that can. Vendors were disposable. Employees were disposable. The product was disposable. Inherently, I knew that there had to be a more ethical approach to this volatile low margin/high volume business model. I understood that in business one should make decisions based on

His family owned garment factories across Asia, and had been supplying merchandise to traditional retailers for decades. The fast fashion business was something that he wanted to grow, and he felt that I would be the right person to help him do it. We opened an office in Los Angeles and got to work! I traveled to Europe frequently to shop the market for trends, while working closely with our buyers to ensure that we were producing styles that met their specifications. I traveled to Asia to work with the factories in the development of samples, learning a great deal about the manufacturing process. Despite the economic downturn, I knew that there had to be a way to create a healthy ecosystem, comprising of manufacturers, middlemen and retailers. My goal was to minimize waste and maximize fabric yields in order to increase our margins. In doing so, I was able to bring in $2.5 million in sales in the first year, while establishing partners with all the major fast fashion chains in the