Today started off no different than previous days except for the fact that we were able to sleep in an extra thirty minutes, which was really the biggest treat. With a long day ahead of us we couldn’t waste any time and took the metro, which day after day seems to become much easier to navigate, and finally ended up at Lineapelle. This experience was definitely unexpected and different from our previous site visits. Going into it I had assumed that we would get a mini informational session about the company, followed by a tour. Instead, we entered into a room to take a seat and listen to a presentation. The presentation included the process of gathering the leather and the business statistics behind the company. Something I found unique about the company is that 99% of their leather comes from animals who are already slaughtered to be used in the food industry. Throughout the presentation we were given several samples of of leather from a variety of different animals to look at and feel. The employee tried to give us key things to look at in order to determine which animal the leather came from. I found it pretty neat to see the drastic distinctions between the different animals. One thing I didn’t expect was to see the samples cut out in the actual shape of the animal. This honestly led to me being kind of creeped out and made me feel a little uncomfortable when touching the samples.
Once hunger set in, a group of us walked back towards the castle to find a bite to eat and somehow ended up in the middle of what we thought was a German festival. This was definitely a change of scenery and a change of tastes because we ended up having sandwiches, burgers and fries for lunch, straying from our usual heavy Italian dishes.
Our next stop was to the Fashion Library which I was pretty excited about, considering my interest in the fashion industry. It was a lot smaller than I expected but I guess when I think of a library I reference the 4 floors of Hillman back in Pittsburgh. After looking around I was drawn to a bunch of magazines from Milan/New York fashion weeks featuring several different designers. Some of my favorite looks came from Giorgio Armani which was no surprise to me. It made me acknowledge that I really want to get into looking at more magazines such as those and discovering different, maybe less popular designers!
To conclude our long day we were given a lecture by a woman from Velasca, an Italian men’s shoe company. I actually really enjoyed this presentation because I felt that it had a strong focus on marketing, which was refreshing to me as a marketing major. I felt that a lot of what was mentioned coincided with my intro to marketing course that I took this past semester. I recognized terms and concepts such as push/pull marketing and selling directly to the customer. We even used the example of Apple who uses dual distribution strategies by distributing to retailers as well as straight to the consumer which was commonly used in my lectures at Pitt. Tomorrow we have a very exciting schedule ahead that I am so eager to experience; I’ll be sure to give an update after the Fashion District!