REALLY exciting week this week! We got the first batch of designs that we sent off back from India! It was so amazing to see the work we had done come together in real life! I thought that the artilliers did an amazing job of translating our instructions and designs to the samples we received.
This was a really rewarding part of the process to go through and by far my favourite experience so far with Story Designs! I was really happy with how everything had turned out.
We started straight away on mounting all the new samples as we had another appointment with Karen Millen booked in the same day that we received the parcel. This was good to get to grips with how designs are presented and mounted to make them professional and appealing to customers. We labelled them and got them logged onto the online system called the pattern cloud. This was a spreadsheet that Julinka had set up so that she can keep track with which designs are sold and when they are received etc. Again, another valuable skill to have learnt about the reality of the administrative side of the business.
After we had done this we headed into the city to go to the appointment. When we got there a few of the buyers and designers recognised me from my previous visit there. This was really nice for me to think that I was getting recognised by other professionals in the industry.
We started the appointment and again I helped with showing the designs. The buyers seemed very interested in the new ones in particular and we got a lot of pulls from them which was quite exciting and promising for the meeting. Eventually we got round to one of my designs that had just come back which was a large scaled beaded floral. They picked it out of the pack and said they loved it! And that they had to buy it! This was AMAZING! What a surreal moment! They ended up buying 5 pieces in total, one of which was one of my new designs that had only just come back into the studio!
Once sold, the rights to the design now belonged to Karen Millen so that they could work on it to add to their SS23 collection. This means it can be tweaked with an changed to suit their briefs, but all in all sometime in SS23 there should be a piece of my work put into mainstream production at Karen Millen and being sold around the world! MIND BLOWN! What an amazing experience!
The rest of the week we were largely working on getting the new designs photographed and put onto the garment templates and then the website so that clients would be able to view and access the new designs.