Spring 22 Collection

Original Pitched Concept: Tea Party

Collection became A Morning in France.

I started by creating a mood board inspired by French architecture, pastry shops and the feeling of getting swept away in a moment. I saw a girl on a leisurely lunch break and taking the long route back to the office to see her favorite buildings, window shopping at stores only seen in movies and pretending like she lives a life on holiday, not behind a desk. This woman knows one day she will be able to go inside those stores, shop carelessly and then enjoy a macaron on hours all her own - only obeying one time clock, the sun.

Using Adobe Illustrator I built my pantone board - pulling colors from the above inspiration and noting colors that have sold/translated best for us from previous seasons. While it is exciting to express yourself in the design, I also find it extremely important to listen and learn from the customer trends. My goal is for the design to grow with the customer that way she always feels seen through any season of life.

Next I pitched stripe ideas. Our stripes are our brand identifier and I tend to design the other groups around the colors and moods of stripes of the season.

Next we scheduled a print appointment with one of our favorite vintage vendors to find the perfect French florals. We purchased the below two prints and had our print designer create repeats using the artwork guidelines below.

Cads I created in Illustrator:

Cads I created in Illustrator:

We then loved the idea of adding Ginghams to this collection. We aligned on creating a classic Noir and White Gingham as well as a Mint and White Gingham, we ended up only producing one colorway.

Next step was to choose our solids. Solids are extremely important to each of our collections as customers always need a base to go back to. As a designer we love to stretch our imaginations, but we also need to balance the fun and playful ideas with core styles.

For this collection we decided to go forward with a textured solid. We were able to source a soft seersucker silk charmeuse that was the perfect fabric for this collection. We mixed this with elegant lace, silk charmeuse heart pockets & fabric covered buttons.

Each season the owner of the company hand illustrates a print that ties the entire concept together. For Spring 22 she created La Patisserie Print. This print brings the yumminess of French pastries and long days spent reading at a Cafe to life.

Once we have built our fabric collection for the season. I am responsible for creating and updating work in progress charts for fabric and sampling development. I create these charts using Excel at the beginning of the season, starting with the fabric chart, in order to keep record of each fabrics content, composition, color and price per yard.

The next steps are for me to create the cads and design boards using Illustrator to pitch to the owner to proceed with sampling.

We always over design to be able to build a smaller collection that combines top selling bodies, our favorite designs, stripes of the season, the florals that work best with the time of year, new bodies we plan to test that season and finally leaving room for the special print.

After we narrow we go into sampling. The sampling process usually starts with us proceeding to SMS as we tend to use a lot of carry over bodies. When we develop new bodies we will often see a 1st Proto and then proceed to SMS. We like to build new styles off our core bodies as iterations of what we know people love/would like in a new pajama style.

For Spring 22 we added four new styles, a center tie top with three-quarter sleeves, a puff-sleeved button-down t-shirt, a high waisted short with bows and a cropped pant with a soft stretchy waistband.

I am responsible for handling all development tech packs across all lines. I use Excel for this process. These tech packs must be extremely thorough and detailed as they are the primary source of communication between myself and the factory. In order for me to receive a correct sample I must provide the factories with as much information as clearly as possible.

After we submit the tech packs and the WIP chart to the factory we wait for the samples to come in. The samples tend to take between 30-45 days so we need to plan ahead accordingly and factor in that timeline to meet our deadlines. Usually during this time we are either designing other collections for our other fabric lines or fitting previous collections samples.

Once we receive the samples we do a casting call for the e-commerce model images. After casting we conduct two photoshoots- one with the model and one of the flat images. The owner and the company and I run these photoshoots and make sure that the hair and makeup artist know the direction. I am in charge of ordering food for the crew as well as set-up and break-down. Once we receive the raw images the owner and I choose the selects for our photographer to edit. These are a few of the highlights.

After we receive the edited photos it is my responsibility to reach out to the factory for costing and then relay that information to the Production Manager. After I receive costing for the season I use Adobe Indesign to put all of the information about the season, style names, fabric content, color names and photos into a season linesheet to show to the stores during buyers appointments.

The final steps in this process is to decide which styles move forward to the production stage. If we need to continue fittings past SMS we work closely with the Production Manager to achieve perfect fit.