During my internship, I experienced what it was like to receive damaged items from a

vendor on a couple different occasions. I got trained on how to properly handle these situations

from our store manager, who showed me how we get in touch with the vendor so we can

receive a credit or return the merchandise that was damaged or that we shouldn’t have

received. There were two different instances that I personally dealt with - one being damaged

merchandise and one being the wrong size run.

In the case of the damaged merchandise, I had to contact the vendor and take photos of

the damaged merchandise that we had received. It wasn’t damaged in a way that we could’ve

easily sewn or fixed on our own. It was something that we were trying to get a credit for since

we couldn’t sell this merchandise. I contacted the vendor with the photos of the goods and

explained to them that we were requesting a credit that we can use to purchase more

merchandise from them in the future. I followed the guidelines properly for how to contact a

vendor in this situation, so I felt like I handled this case properly and continued our trusted and

professional relationship with the vendor.

In the case of the wrong size run that we had received, this was more of an issue for us

than the damaged goods. Our store owner has found that the pack that usually sells best for us

is 2-2-2-1 (XS, S, M, L). We ordered this size run in a pullover & sweatpant set. We received the

right sizes for the sweatpants, but we received XLs and XXLs in the pullovers instead. This is

problematic for us because usually we don’t sell through the larger sizes of the pieces that we

buy, and they end up sitting on our racks or on the sale racks until we can try to sell them the

next season. In this situation, we actually weren’t able to ship the merchandise back to the

vendor - so we were stuck with this wrong size run. We still were able to receive a credit for the

2 wrong sizes that we had received, which was good. We ended up just putting the wrong sizes

in our stock room that we will donate or mark down in the future and add to our ‘Last Chance’ or

sale racks. Since this situation was a little different and off script, I felt like I still took control of

the situation in a professional manner and figured out a solution that worked for both of us.