Samantha is the Manager of Product Specialists and Product Development Coordinators at Made For Retail, a product development studio that develops “comprehensive assortments and turnkey programs for national retailers”. Samantha’s main responsibility is to oversee both the back-end side of preproduction and manufacturing as well as the front-end side of product development and marketing. When not in the office Samantha may find herself visiting manufacturers oversees, learning about their production processes in order to better lead her own teams back home.
Transcript
My name is Sam Isomura. I work for a company called Made For Retail. So Made For Retail is a product development company, so we do everything from design to execution. So that means manufacturing our product overseas and then working with our retailers and our customers to really provide them with a whole assortment of product. So categories of product, we do everything from stationary, so a lot of paper product, to desk accessories, all the way to seasonal products. So every season that America celebrates we have decorations and kind of favors to go along with that. So I manage two teams. One team works on the front end of the product development process, and then the second team manages through the back end, the pre-production process, so working with our manufacturers and our factories overseas. So six times a year we are developing product for our customer and a big portion of that is providing the presentation to the customer. And so the team that I work with that works on the product development side in the beginning of the product development process, works a lot with art files and getting those to be specced and designed to send to our factories and then our factories create samples. And then there's a lot of, there's something called mock-ups. So we mock-up our product and we make it look as if it were going to look like, ready to be sold in stores and we present that to our customer. So that's a big process. It takes several weeks of time and a lot of hands on deck to do that and then we pitch it to our customer and we go from there, and we get a business order after, and that's success for us. So I've gone overseas to visit our manufacturers to see how our product is made, which really provides me some good context to leading teams that work on this part of the process. And then there's a lot of comp-shopping. So just shopping just in the US area just to get an idea of what other retailers have out there, and then ... That's about it. Sometimes our customers do ask us to go shopping with them which is cool, but it depends on the category and the time of the year for that.
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