Genesis Williams, Li and Fung Limited

Li and Fung Limited is one of the world's largest textile manufacturers and designers -- with approximately 7% of all textiles sold in the US originating in some aspect of the company's network, it is an enormous global conglomerate based in Hong Kong with offices in over 40 cities around the world. At the heart of the operation (almost) is Genesis and her mentor Tania Vega on the 20th floor of Li and Fung's New York office located on Broadway at 36th street. Tania is Vice President of Production for special projects. Basically she oversees all aspects of specialty clothing lines from preproduction design, branding, and fitting, to production management, materials sourcing, and distribution. Genesis is her right hand woman in this multi faceted world of fashion production.

When I arrived in the office on Tuesday, Genesis was hard at work behind her computer, entering data into an excel spreadsheet budget. The budget consisted of all recent expenses relating to a clothing line called Cinge that Tania has developed specifically for Li and Fung to be sold at WalMart stores in Canada and Brazil. Genesis has also helped out during fitting and modeling sessions for Li and Fung's Bloomingdales accounts and will have the opportunity to work on Levi's red tab line. All in all, this is a bustling environment with over a hundred people on five floors, separated by departments. Genesis runs between the floors on many days gathering resources and doing errands for Tania. She is becoming very well acquainted with this complex corporation and hopefully her knowledge and experience with come through clearly in the research paper she is currently working on.

The only issue that Genesis needs to be aware of, similar to other interns in this program, is consistency in attendance. She has missed internship twice without an appropriate reason. The main consequence for this besides a loss of school credit is a lack of personal momentum. Internship hours are short and infrequent, so in order to maintain trust and commitment with the mentor, it is imperative to never miss a day unless it is absolutely necessary.