VIP Class Notes (Jesse) [W]

Grammar

can hear about him – can hear him 

in the 2pm – at 2pm

on board / be back (adj)
eg. I will be on board next week

on the same token = use this to relate something to the next thing you’re saying as supporting information

these
that
let
lets go
let’s go

Goal: To make the trip follow-up process more efficient for the next time / one.

First of all, I would like to explain how vendors prepare their proposals after receiving PSS. Once received, internal meetings will be held with their designers and sourcing team to review it and identify their strongest products (*identify which products they specialize in) before preparing the products for client review. Should they lack enough existing products, product development will have to be done from scratch.

Challenges encountered and improvements to be made

– There are some important details such as color pantone, retail and IMU which are missing on the PSS/Style guide. This missing information generally leads to multiple sample revisions which can result in wasted time and expense. Vendors spend a lot of effort to do the initial development for the trip, however, they have to keep revising their designs to meet our expectations. This is especially noticeable as it is a a majority of items being requested to be revised, rather than just a small number of them. It may be better if vendors were provided with more concrete direction and details on PSS up front. This will ensure that when the initial development begins, all relevant factors will have already been considered, thus making the required number of revisions significantly lower.

**** next time
 Limited proposal preparation time for last trip (only gave 2 weeks to vendors to propose for 8 endcaps). There are multiple materials involved in Home Décor, it usually needs to take 20~30days to go through above product development process. Since we prefer not to buy exactly the same product in the market to avoid head to head competition and copyright issue, vendors always need to modify the design or color for the products in PSS before submit the proposals. Vendor will also do better jobs to provide more proposals for buyer’s selection if they have adequate time.

 Photo recap for design selection, for the items which were selected from the proposals, the actual samples seems not appeal to buyer very much when vendors present them during meeting. The possible reasons is the color, texture, finishing… are not what buyer expected they will be when selecting them from the computer screen. Actually, in order to solve this issue, one of the solution is go back to pervious 2 points, vendors would need to have more details on PSS and enough time to do the preparation.

As you know our vendors have been working with Big Lots for a very long time, they are more than happy to work closely with Big Lots and fulfill your needs, however, they would really need your help to minimize the work load for the whole process.