Color Assortment Decision Factors Considered by Women's Clothing Merchandisers in Korea & United States

This research was designed to find decision factors through color assortment planning process by Korean women's clothing merchandisers and to look for if there exists difference with American women's clothing merchandisers. A merchandise assortment is a collection of various quantities of styles, colors, sizes, and prices of related merchandise, usually grouped under one classification within a department. The subjects were 20 women's clothing merchandisers who work for clothing retail stores from 5 to 22 years in US and Korea. The authoring process was done for qualitative data analysis. The decision factors of color assortment planning were identified with four stages; information search, qualitative evaluation, quantitative evaluation, and selection. There were differences of color assortment decision factors due to different business types, business sizes, fashion-ability, sourcing ways, and merchandise turnover. Noticeable color assortment decision factor differences caused by country difference were not found except considering the target market ethnicity and skin color in US market. Korea merchandisers seem to be more sensitive to present sales data usages and spot order availability in color assortments because of more local production use than American merchandisers.