Difference of Garments Marketing and Merchandising

Having produced garment products, marketing personnel start marketing first. They introduce the products to the potential buyers and encourage and convince the buyers to buy the products. If the buyers are interested, marketing personnel submit their price and they take their positive consent with orders.

Where there marketing finished, merchandising is started. Marketing is limited up to introduction of the products and its company to buyers but merchandising is limited from purchase order receiving to shipment. After being finished marketing job, marketing personnel introduce the buyers to the merchandisers. Merchandisers receive purchase order, make plan, develop product line, monitor productions process, ensure goods delivery on time, calculation consumption, prepare costing sheet, put up the buyer’s order file. If there are no marketing personnel or if the marketing personnel are no so qualified or skilled in marketing in that case merchandising personnel make both marketing and merchandising to survive the company.

What is Garments Merchandising ?

The “Garments Merchandising” is known to the persons specially involved in garments trade. The term merchandising has been derived from the merchandise. As a noun merchandise means products that are bought and sold and as a verb merchandise means to sell and buy products.

The term “Merchandising” may be defined as: A person who sells and buys the goods, specifically for export purposes. Garments merchandising means taking purchase order from buyers, buying raw materials from vendors say fabrics and accessories, producing garments from factories, maintaining required quality levels, getting in touch with buyers with all updates, following up the production process until shipment and exporting the garments within schedule time. Garments merchandising means the technique of selling and buying garment related products of a company in the best possible way. From the above definitions, we can say that a person involved in garments merchandising needs a wide range of knowledge and skills to perform his job successfully. The job itself is technical and general as well.  

When an export order is placed to a merchandiser, he/she has to schedule the following main functions to execute the export order perfectly on time.
  • Yarn consumption calculations
  • Fabric consumption calculations
  • Accessories consumption calculations (e.g. sewing thread, label, button, interlining, zipper, elastic, hang tag, poly, carton etc.)
  • Sourcing of yarns
  • Sourcing of fabrics
  • Sourcing of accessories
  • Possible date of arrival of fabrics and accessories in the garments factory
  • Costing
  • Garments production planning
  • Pre-shipment inspection schedule
  • Shipping documents

All the main functions, mentioned above are important but the locating of fabric & accessories are most important as because there are many technical parameters involved in specification in this area. In most collection of fabric for the garments to be made is a major problem. To secure a fabric we should clearly specify the technical specification of the fabric during placing a fabric supply order.