It’s A Long Way To The Sale Rack

You need a new outfit for a special occasion next week. You go to the mall, walk into a store, look through the racks until you find two or three that might work, and head for the dressing room.

You may find the perfect ensemble right away or you may have to shop for days until you find the right one.

This situation is repeated day after day in stores across the country. People pick out several possibilities, discard the ones that don’t fulfill their needs and, if they’re lucky, find some that will work.

Have you ever stopped to think about what goes into getting that one outfit from the design stage to you? Following is a product timeline that will give you an idea of how long it takes just one garment to go from the beginning of development to the clothing rack at your favorite shop.

Two to three years before the garment is even designed, the experts begin developing the fabric and predicting the colors you will want. Much of their prediction is based on research that helps them chart which colors you will desire. Sometimes they have to rely on luck and hunches.

The next stage of development is the designing of the garment. This occurs about 18 months before you see it. For every one design that is given the go-ahead there are probably 15 or more that are thrown out or put away for another season.

At about this same time the designers begin shopping for the fabric. If all goes well, the fabric designers and the garment designers will be thinking along the same lines.

Twelve months ago the design assistants started sewing prototypes of the designs out of the selected fabrics and making adjustments.

Six to nine months before the garment gets to the stores, the designs are shown to the retailers at fashion shows and through catalogs. The buyers decide whether they will pick it for their stores and place orders.

Again, buyers rely on statistics and cycles to help them predict what you will want, but sometimes they just have to cross their fingers and hope their hunch is right.

Production of the items that have successfully made it this far starts about five months before they show up in the store.

The clothing is then shipped to the retail outlets about two to four weeks before it goes onto the selling floor.

Once it becomes available to you it will remain in the store about four weeks. If it sells, great. If it doesn’t, it is usually marked down several times.

Anything left on the rack after about six weeks is usually sold at drastic reductions or donated to local charities to be sold at thrift stores.

Sometimes you may look at a garment hanging in the store and say, “Who in their right mind would buy this?” Just think, these are the designs that made it through three years of designing, change and scrutiny. Imagine the ones that didn’t make it.

xxxx