Westport Big & Tall Completes Travel and Selections for the Fall 2018 Buying Season

CHARLOTTE, NC, UNITED STATES, February 19, 2018 /EINPresswire.com/ -- By mid-January, the buyers at Westport Big & Tall have made appointments and viewed products from several major vendors and exclusive partners, achieving a helpful head-start on the Fall and Holiday buying season.

The next step involves travel to New York, where the buying team has set up appointments with several vendors at their showrooms to see their lines. The companies they visit range from popular lifestyle brands found in most department stores to smaller, niche brands that cater to specific tastes and styles. "To produce an effective merchandise assortment for an international catalog, it's crucial that each brand we consider be somewhat distinct in its own way. In other words, each brand should fulfill some kind of purpose or offer something unique to our customer," explains Bob Beausoleil, a senior Westport executive who is the Head Merchandiser for the catalog. "The one thing that all of our brands have in common, however, and the one thing we always look for, is that they should all appeal to a high-end customer," he continues.

While in New York, Westport will also attend two sizable menswear trade shows running concurrently at the Javits Convention Center on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan. All of the vendors seen in New York account for a healthy chunk of Westport's catalog, and it's up to the buyers to select the best pieces from each brand and put them together into clear, cohesive collections for presentation on the catalog spreads.

Once they're done in New York, the buying team has about two weeks to write some initial orders before it's time to head to one of the biggest conventions in the menswear industry: the Chicago Collective. This trade show is held in Chicago's historic Merchandise Mart - a sprawling commercial building situated right next to the banks of the Chicago River. Its art deco styling makes it one of Chicago's most recognizable landmarks, and it was the largest building in the world when it opened in 1930 - featuring about 4 million square feet of floor space. Only a structure of this scale could house an entire industry convention on a single floor.

Hundreds of brands and vendors displayed their products from individual booths, arranged in seemingly endless rows on the convention floor and flanked by networks of hallways. Thankfully, all buyers shopping the floor are provided with a map to make sense of this labyrinth. For two days, the buyers filled their schedules to the brim with appointments, working 10 hour days in order to finally finish the merchandise assortments for Fall and Holiday.

When they return to their Charlotte headquarters, the buyers will take a brief but well-deserved weekend to rest from their travels before they begin building the collections in the catalog, page by page, and writing the accompanying orders for the product. The fruits of their labor will finally be revealed in late-August, when the Fall catalog is mailed out to their customers.

Westport Big & Tall works to provide high-caliber, stylistically relevant, and aesthetically appealing menswear to big and tall customers with discerning tastes. The Spring 2018 Catalog has just been released, and the collections are available for viewing and purchase on Westport Big & Tall's website. Please also visit Westport's Facebook page, Youtube channel, and Instagram for exclusive content and behind-the-scenes footage, or read the Westport Big & Tall Blog for specialized knowledge and articles pertaining directly to dressing the big and tall gentleman.

Bob Beausoleil
WestPort Big & Tall
704-333-9888
email us here