The first strategy to getting more experience and helping you get into the industry is working retail. I mean this 100%! For those of you who are looking at me like I’m crazy or rolling your eyes – just hear me out. When I say “working retail” I don’t mean getting a job at a local store, miserably folding sweaters for a few hours, doing the bare minimum and then going home.

That’s just getting a retail job.

What I mean is taking advantage of everything at your disposal…I’ll explain. (For the sake of this example, let’s go with a large store like H&M.) 

Regardless of whether you’re hired part time or full time, in high school, college or somewhere in between – the lesson is the same. Don’t just get a job for the sake of getting a job. There is so much to learn when you work in retail, but you have to be willing to take the time to understand so that you can grow, especially if your end goal is a career in the fashion industry. 

Yes – it is 100% possible to start your career in retail and have it lead you to being a professional in the industry. 

This is exactly how I started.

I got my first retail job at 16. Trust me when I say, at the time, I WAS NOT thinking about how this retail job could start or change my career in any way. To me, this job meant I would be financially independent to buy my own things. An employee discount on the clothes was a sweet bonus.

I noticed early on that I loved working on the store visuals. It was something I had never thought of before when walking into a store to shop, but as an employee, I started to see how the visual manager got to work on all aspects of the store’s appearance and didn’t have to worry about sales or customers. 

It also made me realize things like, they put certain items in prominent positions for customers to see as soon as they walked in and put the brightest colors up front. As soon as something was low on inventory, something else would take its place and if that item was also on a mannequin, it would also have to be changed to reflect the new product.

I was intrigued by how much planning and psychology went into the store’s visuals and how it ALL was based on and lead back to sales.

Depending on the store, you could potentially be in charge of changing out mannequins or working on window displays based on your store’s sales or new inventory. Other stores, like the H&M’s of the world, have directives that they receive from corporate detailing exactly what needed to go where or when something can be changed out. 

If working with customers is more your thing, you could look into being a personal shopper for your store. This role has different meanings depending on the store you’re working at, but back when I was in retail, they existed at stores like Express (the next store I worked at for 3 years). This really just meant that you were good at working with customers, asking and understanding their needs and suggesting some looks or items that fit into what they were looking for. 

This role is excellent at forcing you to learn the assortment, understand new items or collections that come in and strategizing what the person you’re working with may or may not like. 

If visuals and customers aren’t particularly things you like, maybe it’s math. Yep – that’s right. Math.

But how does math factor into your retail job? Well, by working at the register, of course. Obviously you’re not calculating totals because the computer does that for you. You’re not even calculating coupon codes. What you are doing is understanding the psychology of every customer that shops at that store and then using math to get them to take the next step you want them to take. 

For example: while I worked at the men’s store at Express (this was back when Express Mens and Womens stores were split up into two completely separate stores), I loved working at the register. We had an in-store credit card that we were instructed to suggest to any customer that went up to pay. When I first started working at the register, I’d get a resounding NO at even mentioning the words “credit card”

Opening this card would save you a percentage – it was no secret, everyone was told to say this when ringing customers up and there was signage all over the store.

However, over time, I realized that if I focused on not just saying the percentage (I think it was 15%), but the total amount of money the customer would save and how that translated into their purchase that day…

BOOM. They’d open the card. 

So for example, I would say something along the lines of “Would you like to open an Express card with us today? If you did, you would be saving $18 on your purchase, that’s like getting this top for free!” 

I’d have to do quick math to calculate this because we didn’t have the phones then that we have now.

Anyway, working the register helped me understand how wording things a certain way, even if it was the same information just presented differently, would change the outcome if the customer felt it was to their benefit. 

It was my own personal introduction to marketing. 

In speaking to some of my students about using retail as a means to get lessons that could help you within your career, many of them felt that this meant working harder to make the store more sales and by default, more money. 

This is not what I’m saying at all. What I mean is, use the tools – meaning visual directives, customer spending habits that you can witness in person, marketing tactics and retail psychology – that are all around you and learn as much as you can. 

These are the things you’ll add on to your resume later when speaking to your retail experience…but we’ll touch upon that in another lesson!