Merchandise Group

Charles and Keith is an international brand for women shoes, bags, belts, and sunglasses. Charles & Keith attract women buyers for their up-to-date, trendy styles and affordable prices. Their competitors include middle-end footwear brands such as Rotelli, Linea Pelle, Everbest, VNC, Vincci Shoes, and local brands in every country.
Charles & Keith now expand their collection to bags, belts, and sunglasses and Charles & Keith Signature Brand.






Charles & Keith is a retailer and they assign several products to the same category based upon common consumers and buying behaviour. They provide variety so that consumers can make choices. Customers can have many different substitutes if they intend to buy a shoe, or a bag. They can choose between high heels, wedges, pointed heels or open-toe heels. For bags, they can choose from many various designs that Charles & Keith have. We all know that the items from Charles & Keith can only be found in within this label because all its products are self designed by Keith Wong and his team.

Charles & Keith’s manufacturer might assign the products to different categories. For example, they might assign them to the different season, product colour, the type of material or even price.


New category

Each manager at Charles & Keith is not in-charge of a particular category; however, full/part time sales assistant who are reliable are given the responsibility to take charge over each categories (e.g. Shoes, Bags, Accessories)

There are Pros & Cons to this:

Pros
-Each category is being looked after different staff. Therefore, if there are new products, it can be displayed on time because the staff that is in-charge can focus more on displaying their new product and maximise the store’s profitability.
-New products contribute to more variety of choices for customers.
-Charles & Keith might win over their competitors in terms of coming up with new designs that suits many customer’s taste. It can then be customer’s number One preferred retail shoe shop.

Cons
-When there are only a new product for one category (e.g. Shoes), the variety of other category (e.g. Bags and Accessories) might still remain the same. Customers might not want to buy and it reduces the profitability of the store.



Currently, Charles & Keith have come up with new designs of shoes, bags and accessories. This is a good move to gain a competitive edge with their competitors. Charles & Keith latest designs suit the changing trends of consumers.






Category Captain

No, Charles & Keith do not have any category captain which advice them in their business. In fact, Charles & Keith is the main strongest competitor in the shoe industry and they observe how their competitor set their prices.

Our competitors are those branded shoe names such as Mondo, U.R.S Inc and Heatwave. Their designs are rather compatible to Charles & Keith but their prices and quality are totally different.

In the local shoe industry, Charles & Keith is the market leader, setting itself differently from Aldo, Guess and other high end shoe industry.


Types of Merchandise Management Planning Process




BASIC - Heels, platform heels, wedges, flats, boots, sneakers, clogs & platforms.

--> Stocks are widely available in every store as to cater to the demand of each customers.



FASHION - Signature Labels.

--> Stocks are limited for signature label because Charles & Keith focus on bringing out the best quality to each specific customer who have unique taste in shoes.