On the Monday this week myself and Lisa had a sales meeting at ME&EM. We had just got the new print run delivered as well so there was lots to show off!
ME&EM was a long-time customer of CocoBloom and they are a big fan of all of Lisa’s prints. We ended up selling two on the spot which was great. I found out a little bit about the practicalities of which prints would appeal most to this brand because they can only do screen printing in production and not digital print. This meant that anything too hand painted or watercolour would be a no-go for them. It’s these sorts of things that I find really useful to be in the know about because I didn’t even know that this was something you would have to consider when selling prints, but this must be something Lisa is always considering when she is generating new prints for her clients.
Just like the last meeting, on the journey to and from ME&EM me and Lisa had the most useful and interesting conversations. I can’t stress enough how easy I find it to talk to her, especially about future prospects and my career. It’s these types of conversations that I think are the MOST beneficial things that I have had come from my internship year. This one-to-one time with a successful business woman in the textile field is priceless. We spoke a lot about what I should consider for my final year at university and how I should most effectively spend me remaining time at Chelsea. I feel very grateful and enlightened by all of my conversations like this that I have had with both Lisa & Julinka.
On the Tuesday I was in the print studio cutting out the new print run so that it could be mounted for future appointments in the following weeks. It was really lovely to see all the new prints that all of Lisa’s designers had made for the next collection. Very very talented people for sure. I spent most of the day doing this because it was an important but slightly tedious task that needed to be done quite quickly.
On the Wednesday Rose, Lisa’s graduate intern came in to help me finish off cutting out all of the prints because there was just SOO much. Luckily as well as doing this, Lisa had been looking into some sustainable dyeing methods and floral printing. She asked me if I wanted to take lead with this. So we headed to the shop in the morning and bought a bunch of flowers and all of the other bits and bobs that we needed. Non of us really knew how this was going to turn out so it was quite exciting and a bit learning experience for us.
OH MY LIFE DID I LOVE THIS! It was just so much fun! I was having such a good time creating these floral prints using real flowers. We started off with scattering petals and rolling them in the fabric and putting them through the steamer so the dye transferred. Then I started to work on some hammering work. This was AMAZING. I couldn’t believe the effects we were getting! I really felt like I found something today that I was so passionate about and loving so much!
We all ended up learning a lot this day. Unfortunately when we put the hammered prints in the steamers they lost their vibrance but they still produced this gorgeous effect that I loved the subtlety of. I loved it. My favourite day so far. Lisa was so happy I was enjoying myself and this technique so much and we were chatting for ages after bouncing ideas off each other about what we could do next!
I spent the afternoon helping Rose to cut out the rest of the print run and calming down my excitement from the print work we had done in the morning.
A really lovely week all in all 🙂