You all think visuals is just dressing mannequins and making things look pretty. It's not. An effective visual should spend most of their time delegating, researching, planning and executing. Our work goes far beyond what's happening in the store. A good visual will be knowledgeable on the current trends, educated on the competition and aware of the increase and decrease of sales. Just cause you think their doing nothing doesn't mean they are.
... And I don't follow VMG because it doesn't match the floor pad. I don't even touch the mannequins because softlines is expected to change the ones in their dedicated departments. So nothing you are saying is relevant to my store or many others....
If this is your passion, I think it's great that you're up on trends and what the competition's doing... thing is... I can't imagine it really making a difference in your responsibilities at Target... You don't have any control over what merchandise is sent to your store. And unless you throw out the VMG entirely, you probably still display most things following corporate's plan. (Ironically, I would think dressing mannequins IS one of the areas you could exercise a little personal creativity, but you pass that up?)
And an end note to anyone reading this, softlines dominates most stores sales mix, therefore only 5% of a visuals time (unless you're an innovation store) should be dedicated to Hardlines. The money is in the clothing.
... correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't the margins a lot better in cosmetics? Do you work on the visuals at all in beauty or electronics? 95% to 5% seems a bit skewed to me...
Picking up a fashion magazine doesn't make me a sucker. Knowing what the color of the year is doesn't make me a sucker. Being aware of what people are wearing around me doesn't make me a sucker. Research doesn't mean sitting at a computer looking up fashion. It means when you walk in a store to by clothes you pay attention to the prices, the Merchandising, the selection...
Yeah... again, you sound like you're really into this stuff and that's great! But no one at the store level has control over prices, selection, or color choices. Arguably someone could be a stellar VM without knowing any of those things, because of the way Target has laid out the VM job description. Your background in the field is more of a bonus than a requirement... so it doesn't really have much bearing on what VMs as a whole should be paid.
Mannequins should only take 5 minutes each to change and those are available in the VMG. 90% of my time is spent in softlines either setting, prepping for price change, overseeing softlines truck push, checking back stock and remerching blown areas.
Hmm... setting, price change, truck push, checking back stock and remerching blown areas... You realize all of those things happen in all the other areas of the store too right? Often (but not always) done by people making the base TM pay.
Its not that I don't think all your hard work is valuable, I'm sure it is! It's that there are many people in the store working just as hard or harder. At a lower pay grade.
