Ever wondered how much money people who work in fashion really make? Or what other people in your field make on average? Well, youre in luck: The results are in from our 2018 salary survey.
At the beginning of the year, nearly 3,000 people who work in fashion filled out our anonymous survey with details about their titles, companies, gender, location, years of experience and, of course, salaries. They spanned areas including design, styling, retail, PR, development, marketing, photo, editorial and advertising at companies likeNordstrom, Tiffany Co. , Condé Nast, Marc Jacobs and Ralph Lauren, as well as smaller firms with under 25 employees.
We had respondents with one year of experience in the industry and respondents with over 20; people who make under $25,000 per year and (very few) people who make over $500,000.
In addition to showing what select fashion jobs pay on average, our results show a few overarching trends. The majority of our respondents had under 10 years of experience and made in the mid-five figures, but those numbers began to increase significantly with more experienced respondents. Company size also had an impact, with employees at public companies making more than those at private ones in most cases.
And broadly, certain fields were shown to be more lucrative than others: For instance, design, retail and PR had the largest percentages of over-$100K salaries, while design and styling had the most over-$200K salaries. In editorial, while an entry-level assistant editor made an average of $35,800, the mean salary for an editor-in-chief was $264K.
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Below youll see the average salaries for several common fashion job titles for which we had a strong number of respondents, but since we had so much info, we compiled all of our findings into an in-depth PDF that you can download for free here. Youll find pretty charts, graphs and percentages showing how things like experience level, location, company size and gender factored into salary. (Yes, the mean salary for men was higher, though less than 10 percent of our respondents were men. ) We hope its helpful!
Design
Assistant designer: $46,910
Designer: $83,500
Creative director: $130,000
Marketing/Social Media
Marketing manager: $65,650
Social media Manager: $62,600
Publicity
Assistant publicist: $65,710
VP: $142,670
Print editorial
Assistant editor: $35,800
Editor-in-chief: $264,000
Digital editorial
Writer: $58,540
Senior editor: $58,390
Graphic Design/Photo
Graphic designer: $43,690
Photo editor: $77,230
Advertising
Bookings editor: $168,500
Account executive: $80,640
Styling
Assistant stylist: $49,760
Stylist: $79,380
Retail/sales/e-commerce
Merchandiser: $61,000
Assistant Buyer: $46,680
Product development/supply chain
Development assistant: $36,930
Product manager: $72,440
