Fashion career: Fashion Marketing vs. Fashion Merchandising? What’s the Difference?

Fashion career advice

When it comes to a career in fashion, you might be drumming your fingers, trying to figure out the difference between fashion marketing and fashion merchandising  In some ways, they’re not all that different and many have said that fashion marketing and fashion merchandising is not just one job, it is many.

Fashion Marketers

Fashion marketers are generally charged with getting consumers excited about new products that are coming in to the stores and getting them to the stores to buy the products.  When you’re considering spending $400 on that new pair of shoes, you can thank a really great fashion marketer for putting the idea in your head to begin with.  

Fashion marketers must work to create a fantasy for a consumer so they can imagine themselves looking more svelte or sophisticated with that evening bag; they can do this through savvy advertising or visual marketing campaigns.

Fashion Merchandisers

Fashion merchandisers generally take the reins from there; where the marketers lure the people in to buy, the merchandisers must set up the store to create a presentation of the items that will be visually appealing to the consumers.  After the marketers get the clothing in-house, the merchandisers are in charge of setting up displays that carry on the image that the marketers have worked so hard to muster up in the shoppers' minds.

People in this field can work in both retail and wholesale settings. While some work as buyers, merchandise managers and purchasing agents to select and purchase apparel and accessories from designers, manufacturers and wholesalers for retail sale, others work on the other side, as manufacturers' representatives and negotiate on behalf of manufacturers with retail stores.

Fashion Marketing and Merchandising, between art and commerce

Some with a degree in fashion marketing and fashion merchandising serve as fashion coordinators with the mission of creating a unified look in a retail store, design house or fashion magazine. Other work as visual merchandisers, designing splashy store displays that will attract customers and help convey a mood.

A degree in fashion marketing/merchandising can allow you to become the manager of a retail store, or enable you to have the know-how to open up your own specialized boutique where you can address the needs of a very specific clientele while promoting your own individual style.

Wherever people in this field work, they straddle a line between art and commerce. On the business side they analyze and implement sales strategies, do inventory control and cost analysis, while keeping a steady eye on profits and losses. But on the art side of things, they are creative, stylish, and innovative, recognizing good clothing when they see it with the ability to sell it to the masses.

I hope that this fashion career column helps you understand better the difference between fashion merchandising and fashion marketing.