The fabric of our lives

Working in the fashion industry often lends itself to the stereotypical assumption that it's an industry just about shopping and gossip, driven by shallow unintelligent girls and gay men, who are super chic and spend their time backstage at runway shows trying to avoid the glare of one Anna Wintour, while sipping on bellinis and smoking cigarettes.  I'm here to tell you that the majority of us in the fashion industry do not experience life in this manner.

Yes, I work with people that you might liken to Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada," but most of them are not that extreme.  Don't get me wrong - it is definitely an industry where everyone is out for themselves and is extremely patronizing, but I also don't have a boss that throws a coat at my face when she walks in the door.  But the two biggest rumors I want to put to rest about working in the fashion industry are the following:

1. It is not as glamorous as people think it is, and
2. It requires more knowledge than just being able to spit off the latest trends in Vogue.

Before I go into my reasoning, I need to explain what it is exactly that I do.  Unfortunately, it always seems to be hard to explain in just a few words, so forgive me in advance for my wordy explanation of apparel production.  The best way to explain it is to liken it to a project manager or a producer of a movie;  I basically am managing a product and monitoring the people, finances, and timing that go into that product, from initial concept, to getting that product to the consumer.  The people that I manage include buyers/merchandisers, designers, product developers, and factories.  The finances I manage include cost negotiations of the actual product at the factory level, understanding international currencies and foreign trade/importing/exporting, factory commissions, & internal profit margins, among others.  The timing I manage relates to hitting necessary milestones in the product development cycle.  

Now that I've explained what I do briefly, that hopefully gives you a glimpse as to why I say my job is not glamorous; it is business.  I will go into that more throughout my future posts, but the purpose of this post is more to illustrate my second argument about the knowledge level required.

COTTON!!!!  No, I'm not talking about the stuff on the end of your q-tip, but the fibers that are in your clothes (although they are derived from the same thing).  In the last 9 or so months, cotton commodities have been priced higher than ever.  Prices have been climbing steadily since the middle of last year, with prices only holding for 24 hours or less.  The primary cause of the rising price has been demand ousting supply.  The low supply can be attributed to initial lower demand compared to other commodities such as soybeans and corn, flooding and droughts, poor quality of the crop, and government trading restrictions (suppliers even resorted to hoarding their crops out of fear of the fluctuating market).  Trying to manage a global business where cotton is one of your primary fabric fibers has thus become next to impossible.  

From a business point of view, companies have been forced to come up with new strategies in the hopes of saving money, or more accurately, reduce the losses they are inevitably going to have to take.  As prices first started to climb, retailers did their best to absorb the increasing fiber prices at profit losses in order to secure sales, but we are now in an environment where retailers have no choice but to pass on at least some of the expense to the consumer.  And guess what?  Those higher retail prices are coming to a store near you starting NOW.  

While the economy has very slowly been recovering (or so they say), we have not felt the effects of the worst of it in the apparel industry until now because of the length of the apparel product life-cycle.  The products that you are going to see in stores and shopping for this month, were designed 9-15 months ago, so the fabric that was purchased for that product was done late summer of last year, just when prices started to climb.  

We have finally started to see a small bit of relief in commodities pricing, but no one knows how long it will last.  New cotton crops will be harvested in August, so prices look to stay high through that time period.  So far the trends are showing a small dip in price September/October/November, then increasing again in December and beyond.  To put things in perspective, a year ago, cotton was selling at approximately 85 cents/lb; last Friday, April 15th, cotton was trading at 219.45 cents/lb, which is actually down from the all-time high of 243.65 cents/lb recorded on March 8th of this year.

OK, so have I bored you to death yet?  If so, that was not my intention.  My only intent has been to show you that fashion is still a business, and not just an on-going series of editorial ad campaigns you see in magazines and on billboards.  

When I went into fashion as a major in college, I certainly never anticipated that stock trading terms would become a part of my daily vocabulary, but here I am, just trying to figure out what the hell it all means.