Loading ...
« Fall Fashion Scoop | Home | Links à la Mode »
Incompetent Salespeople Aughh!
By admins | November 6, 2009
When starting this blog, several of us who are apparel designers were chit chatting about our lives and working in the industry. Specifically, how we never see any media, even a personal blog, about people working in the non-glamorous side of fashion. We discussed all the various perspectives and topics that interested us. One common theme was to have a place to vent about injustices (real or imagined) in the workplace. As we are mostly designers, a frequent grievance was always, salespeople.
Now, for those of you not in the business, let’s preface this by saying, we are not referring to the salespeople you meet in a retail store. Rather, we are discussing the corporate salespeople who take a line of clothing a designer or design department has created and “sells” it to clothing stores. These are often multi-million dollar sales that take place in our NYC showrooms, or at retailer’s various headquarters, or even at the occasional trade-show. Why put quotations around the word sell? Well, because what they do (depending on the quality of your sales team) shouldn’t be called selling. It should really be called, “I am moving this rack of clothing from the design room to the showroom, then I or a designer is hanging up the samples and explaining briefly what each piece is. Then I say good-bye, have my assistant email the buyer the pricing, and wait for an order.” Or sometimes it could be called, “I surf the Internet all day and wait for a replenishment order or other request to arrive in my inbox and then have my assistant process the paperwork.” Or even more frustrating, in some companies the job should be called, “I spend my day shopping until a buyer emails me a list of design concepts they want for the next delivery, I then have the arduous task of printing the list out and walking it over to the design team for them to create, cha-ching, sale made!”
Unfortunately, due to their lack of product knowledge, some salespeople don’t even “sell” the line to the buyer but instead have the designers come in to do that. Later, all the red-tape and paperwork from the sale, is often delegated to a lowly sales assistant who makes no commission from it. Certainly there are plenty of competent salespeople out there, we are not putting the entire profession down. And of course, this situation is rare among independent sales reps but runs rampant in large sales departments where incompetence can get lost in the crowd. Salespeople directly affect the bottom line of a company and it is unfortunate when rather than boosting that number, they act as middle-men, bringing nothing but grief to the table.
Besides the obvious fallacy of the job title, why are design teams often so annoyed by this? Money, yes, cold hard cash. In many of the situations listed above, the design team, along with technical department, and later production team, do most of the work. These departments are working late into the evenings, while the salespeople saunter in and out with rarely a full work day. And yet, they (and they alone) make commission on the product. The product they do nothing to create and put in little effort to “sell”. The designers gets their salaries of course, but the salespeople makes a percentage of these million dollar sales, which is big money over the course of a season or year. This is one reason why when we meet young women wanting a career in fashion, if they name money as a motivator, we recommend fashion sales over any of the creative or “back of the house” apparel careers.
** Are you a corporate fashion salesperson with an opposing point of view? Hey, we’re open if you’d like to do a guest post, just shoot us an email. As usual we love to hear from our readers, so leave a comment below or contact us if you have a story to share. You can contact us at, admin@39thandbroadway.com **
*** Don’t forget to vote in our newest poll, located in the left sidebar ***
Here is more related scoop;
Topics: fashion industry, sales | 7 Comments » 
Email This Post
November 6th, 2009 at 1:38 am
Freakin love this! Brilliant ladies!
Finally somebody put it out there. I have had shitty, lazy, sales people at THREE different companies! And NOBODY ever calls them on their bullshit until the commission stops and the pink slip comes. WTF!
November 6th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Sad but true. Its always surprising when people don’t even try to do their jobs. Especially in this job market nobody can afford to be lazy.
November 6th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I have witnessed this type of thing first hand, it is not just in the fashion industry sad to say.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:21 am
I found this post really interesting… I am a longtime journalist and PR person who would love to find a way into the fashion world but am not an artist or designer at all (I can’t draw; I”m good with words, and people), and I wonder whether this is the type of job I may be good at. But then I wonder, is this type of sales position usually NOT rewarded with hard work? Why are so many of the salespeople seemingly dis-incentivized to work hard?
November 11th, 2009 at 10:57 am
This post is great. In my experience (I am a designer), salespeople definitely are a whole different “breed”. When something doesn’t sell, it’s always the Design Department’s fault (never because they didn’t try hard enough!). They also stay at the nicest hotels during market, get to turn in all sorts of crazy receipts for reimbursement, and even get their bus/train tickets to and from work paid for (I don’t!). Salespeople also always get the biggest bonuses at the end of the year.
The sun rises and sets on salespeople.
I always think to myself, “well, if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have anything to sell!!!”
LOL, sorry for the rant, but this one really hit home with me :D
November 13th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Stacia & Stitchd – Excellent points all around and obviously you can see where we are coming from. It was actually hard to write this post without giving a full on rant and a lot of cursing ;-)
Kissmek & Eyeliah – So true, it amazing us how common this behavior is all around.
Abigail – It is rewarded with hard work, and can be extremely lucrative. The problem is, it can also be moderately lucrative with hardly any work and there are many lazy people out there.
December 12th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Love it! I totally hear you on this one. And the best part is, I used to be ON the sales team (as a sales assistant).
Definitely feel how you had to refrain from posting a full on rant =)