Here’s a shot of my planning wall….. I need little visuals to help my design and decision making when I’m working on each collection. There’s also some baby photos and thank you cards on my noticeboard = inspiration.
I like to ensure all my sketches are to scale and that they line up. I keep the sketches black and white, and only colour them in after I have chosen my final fabrics. And that’s the time when I think about how customers might shop, ensuring that I’m catering for different tastes, occasions, and body shapes.
The fabrics that I choose are a mixture of safe go-to and colourful risks – but my golden rule is only to choose fabrics that I love myself. In the past, I have sometimes chosen fabrics that I didn’t love as I thought the market would like them – but those styles flopped, and I felt disloyal since I had never really liked the fabric. #lessons. After I’ve chosen fabrics and coloured in the drawings (and gone done the long route of product samples) thats when I start thinking about naming the styles.
Not shown in this photo – I have an entire other wall which is covered in fabric squares! (The fabrics that I found myself when I last visited China!)
This doesn’t feel like work to me, it is joy.
