There’s no better assignments out there than the ones that encourage us to go out and get shopping! I went to TopShop at the Grove in Los Angeles, and was met by various displays promoting strong American girl vibes and independent, women-on-the-go vibes. The floor layout was very well organized, with the displays guiding you around the store until you made a circle browsing through all the different products they offered until you reached the exit. Sales racks were strategically placed behind ones offering newer products fitting with this all-American theme at full price. The composition and placement of displays were all that were needed to capture one’s attention, and with every new collection TopShop wanted to feature, they displayed 3-6 mannequins displaying outfit combinations with the new clothes in their collections. A great shopping and educational marketing experience!

When asked to analyze my social media presence, I headed straight over to my Twitter account, in which I engage with my brand audience the most. I was surprised to see that over a month, I earned over 3,000 impressions! By using various social media tools and HootSuite, I was able to get some information behind these numbers. Majority of people who visit page are close friends that I follow and engage with, most of whom come from California itself - which may describe their interest in my Californication posts. Most engagement within my social media brand occurs during mid-day to early evening, typically the time when people get off of school and work and have time for leisure. By analyzing all these various factors behind the statistics of my social media following, I have a greater insight into what is favored by my audience and what is not.

For my final assignment for fashion production, I was to use my mockup as a model and add on materials I have researched to it - including white canvas fabric and blue duct table to add the visual element of stripes. Due to the cost of materials and the hourly wage, the retail price is suggested to be $50. The overall product turned out pretty successful, this was one of my favorite assignments of the Fashion Industry Essentials courses!

For this assignment, we were finally able to bring our designs to life using our previous research with our fabric cards and incorporating our newfound skills of creating production cost tables. Below is my monogrammed purse that I designed - complete with a strap and two decorative jeweled buttons to add a little sparkle and glam to the purse. I created production tables for the three materials I researched - white canvas, black sparkle cotton, and teal felt. Below are the results, with which I learned how to utilize different options to decide which is the best to produce a final product.

What better excuse to go shopping than a research trip? I decided to go shopping at Kohl’s and tried on items from their winter collections: blouses, jeans, coats, and my person favorite: whimsical sweaters. For blouses, I generally fit into 2 sizes; jeans into 1 size; coats into 2 sizes; and sweaters into 2 sizes. I ended up purchasing the sweaters as they fit me the best and picked two of my favorite identically-made ones, just with different colors and prints. For some weird reason, though they were both Mediums, the gray one’s fabric fitted a little more loosely on my frame than the red one. From this shopping/research trip, I learned that though products may look identically shaped on the rack and have the same size on their tags, they do often have a little variation.

When first designing my tank top, I wanted to incorporate an inexpensive little “twist” (pun intended) so I decided to twist the fabric in the back and make a little cutout to add some visual appeal in the back. Apart from the fabric, production costs were not too high, yet I was suprised to see the overall estimated retail price after completed production. Therefore I made the effort to lower that cost to be more appealing to wholesalers, by wasting less fabric and buying from a different retailer online, in addition to switching to a more inexpensive spool of thread to stitch seams on the top. By participating in this assignment, I learned two important things: (a) why costs are so high at department stores for a simple-looking tank such as this one, and (b) how to easily reduce costs and produce an equally appealing garment - I was able to save over $14!