Work Placement:week two

I was lucky enough to spend some time with the Marketing department during my second week where I learnt about the work that they do there. They have a lot of jobs to do and usually tight deadlines to work to. Their main jobs include organising point of sale for the stores, creating catalogues, advertising, fashion shows, maintaining Beales’ website and store promotions.

One of their more exciting jobs is organising fashion shows and while I was their they actually had a fashion show in Bournemouth square as part of Bournemouth Fashion Weekend. To promote this they created leaflets that had all the details of the garment that were shown to try and generate new sales and customers. They handed out these leaflets during the shows and also had them available in the stores.

This was their most recent show to take place, however they also held a charity fashion show in May this year raising money for the children’s hospice Noami House, and promoting George Davies’ latest women’s wear brand, GIVe, which Beales will be stocking from this October. They had to close down the whole of the forth floor of their Bournemouth store during opening hours to do it, but it was a great success and worth the effort as they raised over £1000 for Noami house!

I really enjoyed my time in the Marketing Department and learnt a lot while I was there. It was a really fast paced environment with a lot going on, and you definitely need the ability to multi task and work to tight deadlines to work in a Marketing Department!

To be a Buyer you have to be a strong, confident person with a strong commercial knowledge and the ability to buy products that will achieve the best possible profits.

It was a great end to the week and I was sad to leave as I had really been made to feel as an important part of the team. I have learnt so much from this experience and will be keeping in contact with Jo in the future. This genuinely has been an amazing opportunity for me and will hopefully help me achieve all that I want to in the future.

After working within a buying department I still feel that design is the path I want to take at the moment but as my dream would be to one day be to run my own business the experience I have gained from my work placement has been vital.