What Lessons Can Be Learned From Fashion Product Management?

Product management in different areas and industries contains various aspects and unique features.

Recently, we’ve referred to the latest trends in healthcare product management.

The Accidental Product Manager’s blog post claims that product managers in fashion industry live and die by how quickly they can get their next product to market. This market requires flexibility and non-trivial approaches. The author of the article shares an interesting example of the Spanish fashion company, which reduced the time of work with the product to 25 days.

The fashion world changes very rapidly. Clients find something they like and then decide that this product is the “must have” for this season. And this becomes the problem for fashion product managers who struggle to change their product development definition that fast. They have to order the products that will be in stores months in advance. This requires to be able to see the future. One of the biggest challenges is that it simply takes a long time to get the products that they order into their stores.

Product managers from the Spanish company Inditex have solved the problem of creating fast fashion.

The story starts with their store managers. They talk with their clients to find out what kind of fashions they are looking for. This information goes directly to the headquarter.

The input is given to designers who spend 5 days creating the pattern for a new outfit. Then the company needs 13 days to create 8K copies and 6 days for shipping.

Finally, the design shows up at the store ready to be sold. The total amount of time is 25 days. It looks better than 10 months that it takes other retailers to get new fashions into their stores, right?

More advantages of product management in the fashion company may be found in the original article.