Having really been focusing on designing for the past few week Julinka was keen for me to catch up on a few more of the administrative processes, so she introduced me to the financial system that they had in place there. This was how Julinka kept track of how much each sample was costing her and where she decided on the price of the sample and how much she would sell it for in sales meeting. She mentioned that now I was designing she felt it was important that I had a grasp on how much certain techniques cost to get out in production. I couldn’t have agreed more with this as this was something I came to realise that I was very blind about.
I began imputing the latest designs that had come back into the financial system. It seemed that the heavily embellished pieces were obviously the most expensive because each bead and sequin had to be hand stitched onto the garment meaning that a lot of man-hours were put into these pieces. The same could be said for cutwork as this all had to be done by hand and not by machine. The techniques that didn’t cost a lot was things like irish machine embroidery because this could be achieved quite quickly by machine and therefore the man hours were low.
This was good for me to know going forward when I would be designing new samples to have this in mind. Julinka’s outgoings turned out to be quite high for the manufacturing costs. On average samples would range from £50-£100 to produce. When you bear in mind that these designs sell for £425-£475, these outgoings for production are relatively high. This was really good for me to have an understanding of this and to really put into context the cost of the business and the importance of sales to keep the company turning a profit.
I’m very grateful that I was let into this side of the business as I feel it something that most other internships wouldn’t have offered to me and I wouldn’t have gotten my head around the more hidden elements of a textile business.
As well as logging the finances this week I was working on getting more designs uploaded to the website and keeping everything up to date with the new collection that had arrived.