This week it really felt like I had settled into my role. We were finishing off with taking pictures of all of the new garments and putting them onto clothes via photoshop. I was really excited to show the new designs off at appointments and luckily we had one coming up at Mint Velvet. Their office was on the outskirts of London so it took us a few hours to get there. When we arrived we went through the normal procedures of a sales meeting. I was really getting to grips with how the sales meetings went and how to handle clients. I really loved that I was also getting to see this side of the business as well as the creative side. I felt as though I was getting a very well rounded view of a small business and all of the elements that had to be worked on in order for things to remain successful.
We ended up selling one garment and then had a considerable amount that would need to be put onto a pinboard for them incase they decided to purchase anymore off the back of the sales meeting. I could see how this could be quite irritating for Julinka because the head designer wasn’t at the meeting so no final decisions could really be made without their say so. So especially after travelling so far to have a face to face appointment this result was quite frustrating. Julinka said that this sort of thing happened a lot though and although it is frustrating you can’t let on to the client your frustrations and you have to remain compliant so that you maintain a good working relationship.
The next day I came into work wearing a detachable collar over my jumper. Julinka loved it and said we needed to design our own! I loved the idea of this and got working on it straight away. I loved that we could be so spontaneous with what were to work on each day and that Julinka trusted me to let me start designing things that we were inspired about.
I found an old vintage hanky in one of the draws in the studio that had a gorgeous lily design on it. Since we wanted this to be a nice and quick thing I decided to use this on the collar design with a cutwork backdrop.
As I was working on the design I fell in love with it! We decided to put it on a grey jersey and had the design made up of white cotton with green stitching for the design. I was very very excited to see this one come back to the studio and see what it looked like!
