Bridget - Class of 2012
This was the first week of Senior May
program! For those of you who are not familiar with the program, it allows
seniors to have an internship or design a project for the last three weeks of
school. For my May Program, I am interning at the Cheryl’s Cookies headquarters in
Westerville, Ohio. Students are responsible for arranging and planning their
own program with help from one faculty advisor. I set up my May Program when
Cheryl Krueger came to speak to our school’s Student Ambassadors’ Society in
the fall.
Each student has an on-site sponsor who is
their supervisor during the program. My on-site Sponsor is the director of
merchandising at Cheryl’s, but she also happens to be a CSG alum who did her
Senior May Program at Cheryl’s before she graduated from CSG. Every day I spend
seven hours at the headquarters, and this first week, I spent most of my time
in the merchandising department.
While in the merchandising department, I
have attended meetings where I learned about planning email and store
promotions. I also learned about how prices are set in order to ensure
profitable margins. Another meeting I attended included both the merchandising
and production departments. During this meeting I learned that 14 truckloads of
butter will be delivered to the production kitchen this week. That’s a lot of
butter! One day I helped set up a store display that was photographed and sent
to each of the store managers so that the displays look similar at every store location.
On Friday, I ventured out of the headquarters and spent time with the district
general store manager. I was able to go to the McCorkle, Easton, and
Worthington Mall stores. While I was at the stores I helped fill orders, greet
customers, and bag purchases. At the Easton store, I even passed out free
cookie samples! Easton is the company’s flag-ship store, and it sees a
significant increase in sales during the holidays. The typical shelf-life of a
cookie is between 3-5 days in stores, but many of the cookies are made up to 6
months ahead of time and frozen before they are delivered to stores.
This week I also got to sit in on a meeting
with the company’s photographer. The merchandising department walked through
their preliminary ideas for all of the photos in the 2012 holiday magazine. The
merchandising department typically starts working on the design and marketing
strategy for products one year ahead of time. Right now, the department is
planning Valentine’s day for next year, and is already brainstorming for other
spring holidays.
Tomorrow I will be helping out at a photo
shoot for the Halloween and Thanksgiving magazine. I will be at the photo shoot
for the next three days, and at the end
of the week, I will be going to the location where all of the cookies are sent
to be packaged and shipped anywhere in the country. Stay posted to hear about
the rest of my May Program!
