UNDERGRADUATE PROJECTS
Through my courses at FSU, I gained skills through real life experiences. Below, I have put together images and descriptions of the three major projects that I worked on in my Retail Merchandising and Product Development program.
MockShop
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For my Visual Merchandising class, we were able to create our own stores on the application, MockShop. Our stores were given certain requirements, but we had creative liberty with the overall theme of the stores.
The MockShop application was pretty simple to use. I enjoyed making my imagination into a virtual reality. The merchandise and materials were limited on our application, and my professor had certain fixtures that we had to include, but I tried my best to convey the mood I wanted. The biggest challenge was the merchandise. It often did not reflect what I would want my customer to wear.
Ideally, my MockShop was to represent a new, upscale, on trend boutique. I wanted the dark wood and exposed brick walls to give in a cool atmosphere. The competition of my store would be similar to an Urban Outfitters.
Macy's Lab
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Macy's has provided Florida State with it's own mock store with merchandise. In my Visual Merchandising course, we were assigned to groups where we had to merchandise the store and windows. We also gave a presentation on the design elements and merchandising principles of our store setup.
Our Macy's Lab was awarded 3rd place
The Macy's Merchandising Lab was a really great experience. I worked with a team of 12 to completely merchandise our own department store. Our store was called "Wildflower". The overall image we wished to portray was an upscale boutique that radiated "good vibes". We imagined that our market would be working, upper-middle class women between the ages of 25-35.
We had a total of 5 departments and 2 window displays. We wanted to merchandise for the spring season, so our window theme was "Bloom Where You’re Planted". We wanted our displays to be fun, so we included some cool props like, hanging paint cans with flowers and a bike with a basket of flowers. In my smaller group of three, we were responsible for the Seasonal apparel. Our customers would ideally be those that vacation. Our color scheme was pastels. We wanted to pair together light fabrics and coordinate with some heavier sweaters for the chill that often comes with spring.
My team did an amazing job working together to pull this off. We were awarded 3rd place out of the 8 groups in class for most impressive presentation and knowledge of merchandising rules.
Trend Forecasting
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The clothing brand, Venus, sponsored a project for my Trend Forecasting course. We reported our research, learned the Kaledo design program, and created a trend board for a competition.
Our Trend Board Presentation won 1st place!
For my Trend Forecasting course, our final project was to complete a trend report for the company, Venus. We completed a seven page research paper about Venus's target market, current socio-culture and apparel trends, our trend and how it could be applied to Venus.
Based off of our trend, "Barely There", we used the Kaledo program to design four styles to appeal to the client and their consumer. On presentation day, though it was also a bad hair day for me, our trend was awarded 1st place out of 20 groups.