I have learned a ton about inventory, co-packing, wholesaling, end caps. All these concepts are easy to breeze by in what I do for a living or assume that there is a marketing manager or specialist in one of our companies that handles that.
I don't really know anything about sales figures, to be honest with you.
If you think about a business where uncertainty is an anathema, it's around consumer spending, and it's around retail.
Using a forecasting company is like going to a fortune-teller. If you believe the company and the color does not sell, who do you blame? The forecasters? No, you blame yourself.
When you say we're bringing a product to market, you make sure you execute.
I think it is really important to have a sense of business. As a designer you can get so wrapped up in the design and fashion side that you forget the business side.
If you sell a physical product, you have a lot of Q4 upside and unpredictability, but now you have to manage your cash to get to Q4 so that you can invest in building inventory to over-perform.
I can promote until I am blue in the face, but ultimately nobody knows what makes a hit.
A computer can tell you down to the dime what you've sold, but it can never tell you how much you could have sold.
None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read.
