Second Day

Today was the second day in my senior project, and I spent the entirety of it the company's Irving offices. I spent most of the morning sitting in on meetings. The first meeting was to schedule upcoming promotions for the company. The end result was a promotional schedule that looked nothing like it did when the meeting began. In the second meeting they discussed the corresponding e-mail schedule for the promotions. Because the schedule had been completely rearranged, the meeting was largely superfluous, and thus very short. The last meeting was much smaller, dealing only with creative. Trey, who I shadowed yesterday, came to this meeting to show the rug shots from yesterday, which turned out great.
After the meetings, I talked with Karen, who discussed test sites for website refreshes, the company's online catalog, and the creative aspect of banners and e-mails. I finished out the morning with Lori and Carmen, who were both very sweet. They are web designers and they showed me how they design the banners and the web catalog Karen had talked to me about.
After lunch, I spent two hours with Leigh, an director for the fashion side of the brand. Leigh and the rest of her team were finishing up lunch when I got there, so she showed me around the studios, and explained the entire process. Becuase of the vast quantity of merchandise, organization is very important. Before each shoot, the stylist selects a sereies of complete head-to-toe looks, that are clearly labeled. All of the outfits included a tag with a barcode, that makes keeping track of the pieces in each photo very easy.  They resumed the photoshoot shortly after lunch, and it went very smoothly. A couple of things that I found interesting: Everyone know models are very tall and skinny, but I didn't realize how tall and skinny they actually were until today. They were wafer thin, but they towered over me! Also, you think that models only look that good beacuse pf Photoshop. Not so, I saw the raw images, and they were practically perfect. Leigh told me a good hair and makeup team are far more important than any digital touchups.
During a break in the photoshoot, Leigh took me to see Peter, who does all the design for one of the company's offshoots. He took me to talk to Erica briefly about writing copy (the headline and byline used to describe and promote a product), and then sat me down to design my own e-mail.  I also went back to the studio and took a couple of snapshots for the brand's Facebook page.
To close out my busy day, I went and talked to Michael, who designs and sets up website refreshes. He is responsible for making sure that every time the website is changed or an e-mail is sent out all links function as they should. He talked a bit about the different formats used to make the website viewable on desktops as well as on iPhones and iPads. He also told me a little about IC and EC codes that collect data on each person who visits the website or recieves promotional e-mails. This information is used to form marketing strategies to promote the brand.