12 months as a Fashion Marketing Intern

For 12 months I took on the role of a Marketing Assistant Intern at a small start-up e-commerce company called Mandy's Heaven. Mandy's Heaven have a target audience of women aged between 35-60, the items are fast fashion, with 20-40 new items being uploaded to the website a week. I was given a lot of responsibility at the company and was able to create a lot of their marketing for the website and social media platforms. The Facebook page has an audience of 30,000+ people. I also created a lot of the email campaigns; thinking of a theme and design for the campaign first and then adding in the photographs from the in-house photoshoot. This allowed me not only to show off my creativity but also to develop my analytical skills, identifying which offers had been a success in the past and thinking of new ones to run through the email campaigns. As the company are small in comparison to some of their competitors an advantage was that we could decide on what kind of marketing campaign we were going to launch just the week before doing so.

Below are some of the website banners that I created over the 12 months: (click the image to go through the slideshow)

These are some of the Instagram posts: (click the image to go through the slideshow)

Instagram Post's

Instagram Post's

Instagram Post's

Instagram Post's

Instagram Post's

An important part of my role was not just creating the marketing material but also monitoring them. This meant experimenting with splitting groups of customers and sending emails with different subject lines and discounts to see which worked best for future reference. As well as, analysing the database of customers and editing the email contents accordingly, for example, sending a larger discount to groups who haven't purchased before in order to entice them to do so.

I was also able to gain an insight into the process of social media optimisation – learning about who to target with social media advertisements and analysing the data of how successful each advertisement was. As well as this I was also analysing and tracking web traffic to the company by seeing how many people hit the website and what platform has led them there. This helped us to understand our audience and what advertising worked/needed to be improved on.

Along with the marketing and social media I also helped with buying. Therefore, I saw the process through from wholesale, to business, to customer. We would go to wholesalers/suppliers in London and pick new stock for the website and boutique on a fortnightly basis. Buying products that worked well for the target consumer and that stuck to the budget. As well as re-stocking items that were successful and making sure we were allocating for the right quantity of items based on the forecasted demand.

Through this I was able to attend the PURE London Trade-show in February 2018.

Another responsibility I had was editing the photoshoot images using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop; Lightroom was used to edit the brightness, contrast, clarity and enhance the colours within the image. Photoshop was then used to compress the size of the images down to make the website quicker and remove any imperfections. Once the photo's were ready for the website I would create the product listinging's by writing creative and informative product descriptions, uploading the inventory for the products and deciding on a correct price based upon the margins.

A big part of the placement involved engaging with customers, dealing with any questions they had over social media sites such as Facebook and over the phone which allowed me to develop skills in problem solving and communication. The business is not all online, there is also an appointment-only boutique, helping when groups of customers came over to the boutique once again improved my communication skills. Over the 12 months I helped at many different events that we were trading at, these included; The Ideal Home Show, Country Living Christmas Fair, The Horse Of The Year Show, and many others.

Over my time at Mandy's Heaven I was able to learn all about the company, below is a blog post I wrote for the website, about who the company are:

https://www.mandysheaven.com/blogs/news/a-little-bit-about-us

Being able to experience not only the marketing side of the company but also the sales, buying and customer service has allowed me start my third and final year of university with a well rounded experience of the fashion industry for a start-up company. It was also a great confidence boost having so much responsibility and input into the company.

Overall, I think that from taking the placement year I'll be entering final year in a much better position and I feel 100% motivated to put my all into the third year of university.