Fashion merchandising covers a range of features and tasks, such as connecting consumers to the fashions, ensuring the merchandise is accessible and attracts the intended market, anticipating new fashion trends, fulfilling the needs of designers and consumers, overseeing the manufacturing and marketing of materials, campaign development, sale strategies and advertisements. Because fashion merchandising requires more than just an eye for fashion, there are a number of tutorials you can use to become familiar with the different aspects of the industry.
Understanding the Basics
Before you look at the tutorials, it's worth examining what a typical curriculum for a Fashion Merchandising Program or degree entails. The site Education-Portal has a section devoted to fashion merchandising; degree program objectives and sample curriculum. According to the site, the critical areas to focus on are: fashion trends, visual merchandising, public relations, retail marketing, fFabrics and textiles, sales promotion, fashion styling and advertising for fashion. Once you have a clear understanding of what these subjects entail, you'll be better equipped when it comes to navigating through the tutorials and glossaries.
Fashion Trends And Fashion Styling Tutorial
Fashion-era.com offers free fashion templates, galleries, design tutorials and other resources to guide you through the art of fashion. The site also has specific sections and exercises on fashion sketching, basic body templates, costumes, body adornment and Fashion-era Forums where users can post questions, get feedback and share their designs. In addition, Fashion-era.com has a fashion history site map, where you can look through all of the past and current trends in the industry.
StyleList, is another useful site containing the fashion trends, runway trends, runway reports, different styles, and dossiers on all the established and up and coming designers. In fashion merchandising, it's critical to know what people are wearing and where, as well as the works (lines) of fashion designers. Browse through the pictures to get a feel for their different styles, use of colors, fabrics and techniques.
Fabrics and Textiles Tutorial
The Fabric & Textiles Definition List by Apparel Search is a one stop tutorial for everything fashion merchandising. In addition to boasting a detailed list of fabric/textile definitions, the site contains clothing and fashion industry definitions, fashion terms, fashion history, fashion designers, fashion brands, dyeing, embroidery, fibers, sewing industry terms and definitions, foot/headwear industry definitions, miscellaneous apparel industry terms, and shipping industry freight and warehousing definitions.
Business Side: Research, Sales, Retail Marketing, Advertising & More
Infoma.com is considered to one of the premier search engines within the fashion industry. As noted by their site, users can access more than 350,000 international retailers, manufacturers, firms, brands, showrooms, trade shows and press outlets. The site also holds market reports, statistics and related industry research items that you can search by country, buyers, stores or category of fashion merchandise For example: Accessories, Eveningwear, Intimate Apparel & Lingerie, Outerwear, Jewelry, Swimwear & Beachwear and others.
The NPD Group (npd.com) is another site that can help instruct you on the market and business side of the industry. They conduct market research for various apparel, footwear and accessory industries. You can study the analyses they put forth regarding things like top of market trends and what retail outlets are most successful when it comes to meeting the needs of the consumers.
Tags: fashion merchandising, designers fashion, different styles, fashion designers, fashion history, fashion industry