Learning Curve from Boutiques to BELK...

What a busy few weeks it’s been. I’ve been traveling all over from Las Vegas to New York promoting my line and, of course, teasing my new Belk collection every chance I get. Most recently, I went to Charlotte to meet with the vendor relations team at Belk, as well as my buyers, Christine and Emily, to start talking about all of the small details I never realized were so important.

Until now, Natt Taylor has been sold mainly in local boutiques and the process has been fairly simple. With Belk, it’s a whole different ballgame. Every item, in every size, color and style has to be coded and tracked with style numbers and UPC codes. During my meeting at Belk, I learned how to make that happen and talked about all of the logistical parts of this process I need to consider before my line ever hits the floor. To be honest, hearing all of this in our meeting seemed a little overwhelming, but at the end I was so grateful for the information Belk provided. It will be critical to my success with Belk now and in the future.

After meeting with the other Southern Designer Showcase winners and our Belk “teachers,” I met with my buyers to go over the final production samples. Everything looked so good! I was very excited to show it to the Belk team, and after seeing all of my pieces together, we decided instead of including two striped Lola tops, we wanted to do one striped and one solid to offer more variation for customers. It’s little insights like this that I know are making the collection the best it can be.


{LOLA Top, black and white stripe}

This meeting was a little bittersweet because we only have one more to go before our lines are in Belk stores and on belk.com in March. I’ve really enjoyed this process and I don’t want it to end, but I’m definitely ready to see Natt Taylor at my local Belk store at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta!

Learn more about BELK Designers and the entire process by visiting www.belkdesigncontest.com

 


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