Undergraduate Blog / Career Development

Fifth and Final Blog

With my internship coming to a close, I had one final project left in store for me with RVN.  The dreaded words: market research.  Luckily my supervisor didn’t want me to sit behind a computer and go on IBIS world and look up every single critical detail having anything to do with fashion.  But rather, he requested that I organize and facilitate a focus group, something we are very familiar with over at Babson.  Lucky for me, We already had a group of our target women volunteer for the job, so there was one thing I could check off my to do list.  I went on to create a list of questions, just as my professors had taught me, starting with the vague and gradually moving towards more company-specific inquiries.  The main goal of the focus group was to define our customer, their buying behavior, and to ultimately determine what they want from us in the future (a screenshot of the questions can be seen in this post).  I started out with about twenty questions, but after some good advice from a fellow Babson student, I condensed those that could be condensed and removed those that could be spared.  I seemed to have forgotten that focus groups last hours even with ten questions.  I ended up with a total of nine questions, but my plan was to use them as guidelines and to initiate a discussion amongst the volunteers.  Unfortunately, about a week and a half before I was meant to leave New York and go back home, I found out that the girls were only able to all get together for the focus group the day after I left.  I was unable to facilitate the discussion, but I prepped fellow interns and I was reassured they ran a successful focus group.  That was the end to my internship with RVN NYC, but it was a great run.

Well I actually lied…I was given one more task…pick an item of clothing from the line as a final gift to a treasured employee 🙂Screen shot 2013-08-17 at 2.35.09 AM