I wrote this post awhile ago for a new in role SL TL who wanted some tips. I figured you might find it useful.
Instead of saying "all stores are not the same" throughout this post, I'm just going to give advice as if it were for my store. If you're not in a year-round beach store like I am, Ready-to-Wear might not be the monster it is at my store because you don't get swimsuit traffic, etc.
My softlines breakout (in order of difficulty, hardest first) is 1) Ready-to-wear 2) Boys, girls and infants 3) Shoes/intimates/accessories 4) Men's and activewear. Whoever will be doing the hardest dept comes in earliest (RTW at 4:30) and the easiest comes in latest (Men's and active at 6-6:30). Obviously put your strongest people in the harder areas unless you are trying to performance someone out; put a bottom performer in RTW and the resulting nightly zone will be a PDD handed to you. When they come in they go to the fitting room for their assignment, along with grabbing their strays. Between shoes/intimates and men's activewear, whoever is done first will go over to accessories.
The task of openers will vary based on the dept's needs. Maybe they need to audit mannequins (make the outfits on mannequins more obviously available, change mannequins out if you're heading into a weekend and you don't have enough of the mannequin clothes to sustain sales, etc.) Maybe the closing team left basics for last and it's a disaster (to ensure this happen, at 10PM every night, my team hits basics for their respective depts.) Maybe it's zoning/working out jewelry. Maybe it's running strays from the night before -- which is usually the case. My mids exclusively run strays unless something else big comes up that needs to be addressed. In comparison to hardlines, softlines gets MASSIVELY more strays, so my dayside team is essentially there to guest service, do the occasional pickup if an area gets shopped hard, and to ensure that my closing team isn't overwhelmed with strays so that they can get a decent zone in.
Closers are there to zone, and run strays. Coming clean on strays and with a good zone is ideal, but your success on that will vary with the strength of your team. When my closers come in, they do a zone of the outside of their area (to maintain brand and have the area be inviting to guests --> driving sales.) Then they move through their area from one end to the other. Some closers will kind of bounce from bad area to bad area: strongly discourage this! That strategy makes it really hard to see at a glance where they're at in their zone, which is important so you can (1) see their pace and (2) determine if they're falling behind, so that someone from one of the easier areas could help out when done.
Fitting room is there to process rewrap and salvage, sort strays and check guests in and out of the fitting room. Rewrap and salvage should be done as it comes in; rewrap should then go immediately back with the right dept's strays, and salvage should be condensed and then FR should regularly call a cart attendant over to pick it up. Strays should be sorted into the dept's 3-tier for folded and z-rack for hanging. A huge part of sorting strays is for them to sort it by brand according to how the dept flows! If RTW moves from Mossimo Red to Mossimo Black, the strays on the rack should be sorted that way. Having the RTW TM sort the rack after FR has already "sorted" it is double work, and a huge waste. FR should also walk the fitting room every hour to check for empty packages.
Also remember that softlines much more than hardlines is a juggling game. If, at 8PM, you feel like you're doing better on zone than you are in strays, shift your focus.
. One thing that seems to be really important is partnering with your VMTL (if you have one). Ours helps a ton with adjacencies, mannequins, etc. When it comes to your team, give them clear expectations and keep them updated with what's going on. For example, my DTL had us move our RTW swim display to a different area on the floor pad, so my TL's been really focused on that. So every shift we try to get swim cleaned up and reshoped first. For zoning in the evenings, my TL assigns us each to areas where we are strong in, yet switches it up every once a while. Also, empower your team. We're encouraged to move clothes around if we see a rack that's pretty empty or messed up, etc. I really don't think I could ever be a softlines TL. It's a lot to handle. My store is A volume; we've got 2 hardlines TLs but only 1 softlines. Go figure lol. Good luck!
