Blog #236  I talked about 2007 starts off with many new changes. In this blog I want to talk about the Couture site gets a facelift.

We launched the Stuart Weitzman Powered by Zappos site in February and the Taryn Rose site a few months later. We would create the site for the vendor using their brand messaging. It was a full-service web production & development site hosting.  The fulfillment of all orders would be managed and replenished by Zappos. We would have a dedicated customer service team to handle all customer inquiries as well. There would be a Powered by Zappos logo on each site.

The Couture area which Eileen headed up and launched in 2004 was adding some great brands while keeping a separate site from our Zappos site. The brands on the Couture site were very protective of their brand image and exclusivity of their styles. The true definition of couture is custom made garments. The term for our selection would be more high fashion brands with unique styles that set the fashion trends. These are usually not mass produced and limited replenishment, if at all. We had launched the site in 2004 and it was time to update the styling and aesthetic. They had been working on it for a while and was revealed in March. It was really beautiful. They had done an amazing job and you could really see each style in great detail.

On the finance side we decided to switch over to SAP to be more efficient on our reporting and bookkeeping. It was a process to convert, and training was involved for each area affected. We would have to sign up for training and basically was held in a classroom type setting and they would give several classes for each topic we would have to learn. We were all a little nervous about the transition but just like everything else in the company the change wasn’t as bad as the lead up to it.

The new office on corporate circle had three buildings, CLT was in one building, legal and finance in another and merchandising was in the main building where the lobby was. Some of the conference rooms were in building three however so it was a jaunt to head over to building three after checking in at the lobby. We decided to buy some golf carts to help in the transportation from one building to the other. Heaven who now works in Merchandising in the Casual lifestyle area is pictured here when she used to work at the help desk in the lobby. She would often take a cart and transport the vendors to their meeting room.

Our next trip to China would be in October so we were starting to plan the trip. We would be attending a golf tournament there, so I needed to practice my golf game as I maybe played once a month. We were told they would be providing caddies to help us with the club selection and it would be a scramble so less pressure.