Internship Spotlight: Breanna Boch, Ross Stores Inc.

Breanna Boch is a Marketing and Entrepreneurship major graduating in the spring of 2022.  This summer she interned with Ross Stores Inc. as ann Assistant Buyer Intern in Los Angeles, California.

What was the process for getting this internship, job, or summer experience?

The process of obtaining my internship started with meeting my recruiter at the Eller Expo. While I was expecting to ask and answer basic questions, he challenged me by asking about hypothetical situations. It built a great foundation for the rest of my interview process which consisted of two more interviews. One more was held with the recruiter and the last one was four hours long where I met several buyers and merchandisers from the buying team via Zoom. I was asked about my past experiences, my skills, my weaknesses, and what I was hoping to gain from my internship.

What was a typical day like?

A typical day as an assistant buyer intern consisted of me populating shipping reports, updating my managers and vendors about shipments, gathering product performance data and working on my weekly best and worst sellers' presentation. Each week I would present my findings of our best and worst selling pieces in the girl's dress department to my buyer, my buyer's assistant, the GMM, and the DMM. It was a great experience, as it helped me become more confident with presentations and research. Towards the end of my internship, I was also given a lot of time to prepare my final presentation which concluded with me giving a detailed proposal suggesting a direction the girl's dress department should head in.

What was your favorite part of the experience?

My favorite part of my experience with Ross, was having the ability to actually visit Los Angeles and meet with my buyer. The entire internship was supposed to be in person, but with last minute COVID flares in L.A. everything became virtual. Towards the end of my internship, my buyer and I scheduled a trip where I was able to get a tour of the buying office, go competitive shopping with the team to identify upcoming trends, and participate in a vendor meeting where I had the opportunity to pick out patterns, I felt would be successful in the girl's dress department for Spring 2022.

If you worked on a big project, please describe it below:

My final project consisted of a full in-depth recommendation of what the girl's dress department should be focusing on moving into Spring 2022. My project required lots of research to identify trends our girl's customer preferred. To do this, I dug up data from the past six months to analyze successful silhouettes, colors, bodies, and patterns that performed exceptionally well. I discovered great success with GWPs, which are items with added value (ex: a dress with an additional necklace or purse.) I identified our past successes by looking at item turn, sell through, and mark down percentage and utilized my findings by adding them to my overall recommendation. The next part of my project was competitive shopping and searching for new emerging GWP trends. I visited several stores, including boutique, discount, and department to fill voids within their selection of clothing, as well as bring new styles to freshen up the racks at Ross stores. After completing that component of my presentation, I had to give a brief analysis of the entire department's performance, including sales as well as overall performance between toddler, little girl, and big girl. This section of my presentation also featured individual vendor performance which presented a great feature to my recommendation with how Ross should move forward as well as with which brands. My entire presentation clocked in at about 23 minutes, which gave 7 minutes for setup and questions.