5 Ways To Successfully Collab With Your Chapter’s Executive Team as an Apparel Chair!
As the incoming apparel chair for a sorority or fraternity, you carry a huge responsibility on your shoulders. After all, you’re in charge of making sure everyone’s wearing the coolest merch for every event that your chapter holds, and there’s a lot of them in just one year!
To make sure that you’re making merch everyone will love, you need to coordinate with the executive team of your sorority or fraternity. You guys all need to agree on the final designs, after all! Can’t have your fraternity or sorority Spring Rush shirts accidentally printed with an orange cowboy design when your chapter agreed to brown and white, right?
As a collegiate custom apparel company, that is also our personal nightmare.
With so many awesome but busy people leading your chapter, it makes sense to Google, “How do I work with my fraternity/sorority executive team?”
Aaaand because we make custom shirts for Greek orgs across the United States + are licensed merch vendors for most schools in America, we def know a thing or two to help. We’ve worked with so many college students over the years that if we go back to college, we’d kill it on any Greek exec team—not even kidding.
So here’s everything you need to know about effectively leading your sorority with your exec team!
1. Know who’s in charge of what
Your chapter’s shirts should be designed according to the theme of your next event. If there are no themes, you still need to know who’s the key decision makers whose opinion on what you’re doing for merch matters.
So who among these queens should you talk to for your sorority’s Spring Rush theme?
Let’s say you need to do Spring Rush merch for your sorority or fraternity. The people you should chase down the halls of your chapter house are the recruitment chairs!
Depending on your chapter, you may have co-chairs to lock down and even your chapter president! The rule of thumb is: if they’re overseeing the event the apparel is for and can influence you to change things about your merch order, you need to coordinate with them too.
For example, with Spring Rush 2024 coming, Sofi Melgarejo (the apparel chair of Zeta Tau Alpha) is coordinating with her chapter’s Apparel CO chair, the recruitment director, and the decorations committee. Jordan Ostrowski (the merchandising chair of Pi Beta Phi), is collabing with the Vice President of Recruitment, and the Director of Recruitment Events for her chapter.
Keep a list of who’s in charge of what at the start of your term, including their contact info. That way, whenever there’s a new event coming up, you already know who to reach out to!
2. Lay out your semester calendar with the exec team
How your brain looks like figuring out all the dates and deadlines you need to remember.
According to our Campus Managers who are also Merch Chairs, exec teams can help apparel chairs by letting them know at the beginning of the sem what events are happening in the next few months.
You can also be proactive by doing this yourself! When you meet with the rest of the exec team for the first time, ask them what events you guys are doing for the entire sem, if not the entire year. The dates may get adjusted a bit, or they may only have an estimated week, but that’s a lot more helpful than not knowing anything!
Once you get the tentative dates, block them out on your Google or phone calendar. That way, you’ll know what events are happening in advance and how many weeks you have left to work on merch.
We recommend you start working on merch for an event at least 1.5 months before you need them. It gives you plenty of time to get samples with multiple design ideas and get the rest of your exec team’s buy-in.
3. Set up a group chat
Okay, we get it—setting up a group chat just for one or two events might feel excessive, but TRUST US, you’ll thank us after you do it.
At least you don’t need to dress up to meet the Philanthropy chair on a Saturday!
You don’t want to ask Becca about the theme, and then Courtney about the decorations, only to find out that they’re both thinking of doing different themes, right!? Avoiding that is as simple as making sure everyone can see the plans in one place AKA a group chat!
After knowing who you should contact for which event, text them individually about setting up a group chat so you guys can start planning. You can do this on whichever platform you guys use a lot, like GroupMe or Discord. Name it the event name + planning committee or whatever so you and everyone know why you’re all in there.
Can’t tell you how many group chats we’ve been added to without warning and got us confused… don’t confuse ‘em!
That group chat is going to be more than just a mode of communication between you and the other execs. It’ll be a great place to dump stuff you guys need, from screenshots of designs you like to contact numbers of people you’re trying to hunt down so they can fill out the group order form—all to drive decision-making and keep things moving!
4. Get organized with the exec team
How collabing with online tools feels like IRL
Okay, so you know who to contact, you know when things are happening, and you know how to contact them. The next step is to make sure that you are all collabing smarter, not harder!
With so many events happening in just one sem, things can get confusing and messy before you know it. Files can get mixed up, designs might not get approved on time, etc. And you don’t need, want, or deserve that stress on top of keeping up with your classes!
Ask the exec heads if they’re using a project management platform to track everything they have to do and see if you can learn it so you can all work on stuff there. If not, you can try something like Notion! There are lots of tutorials on how to use platforms like Notion for team projects, and then you can customize them further for your chapter’s exec team!
If you don’t want to learn another new platform entirely, there’s always Google Drive (and the other Google apps like Docs and Sheets) or Microsoft OneDrive for you guys to use for free!
You can also try using shared Pinterest boards, where you and the chair involved can save design inspirations and outfit ideas for the entire chapter based on the theme. This is helpful if you’re a visual learner, too!
5. Don’t just make it all about work
You guys can still have fun, like plan your OOTDs along with the designs!
Don’t you just hate it when you’re working on a group project with people you can’t get along with?
The exec team isn’t just a group of decision-makers in your chapter. They’re your sorority sisters or fraternity bros or your gender-neutral good buds. Collabing with them may get rough sometimes when you guys can’t agree on stuff for the merch you’re doing, but that shouldn’t affect your relationship with them!
Throughout your time working with each exec, try to make meetings not just about work. Catch up with each other over coffee, talk about your classes, or get a little delulu with them about that cute guy from their class who just asked them out on a date! Trust us, you and the exec members are going to work better together when you have a great relationship going beyond what you need to finish.
Why not try these tips out on the next event you’re doing, like Spring Rush? Good luck!!