Competencias, capacidades y desempeños del área

Label C3 and Company A are direct competitors in the branded fast fashion wholesaler market. Despite this, Label C3’s design process differs significantly from that of Company A. The discussion of this difference demonstrates the range of design processes that may co-exist within different companies in the fast fashion sector, although the companies may share similar objectives and outcomes. Label C3 sits within the larger Company C, a mid-market womenswear wholesaler and retailer, to be discussed in depth in Chapter 7. Label C3 is a lower pricepoint compared to the other two labels in Company C. Label C3 is also a direct competitor of Company A’s three brands, and they share retail floor space in many boutiques and in a major department store. However, in terms of design process, they operate very differently (see Figures 5.5 and 5.6). A key difference is that in Label C3, there is one designer, Sophie, who has an assistant to help her.²⁰ In contrast, in Company A, design tasks were shared throughout the seven-member team in order to build consensus on the fashion trends. Sophie said that she felt under pressure with her workload, saying,

“So it's pretty crazy. I don't sleep a lot, to tell you the truth. As you can see we don't have many people helping. There's only me” (2011). Like Company A, Label C3 puts out a new collection monthly, with the number of styles in the collection varying

20 At the time of the interview in January 2011, the assistant was on maternity leave.

from 40 to 80. In between, Label C3 may also provide ‘injection ranges’ for their major department store customer.

Figure 5.6 Label C3 (fast fashion) design process

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Research, analysis, synthesis and selection

Figure 5.6 details Sophie’s design process. Every six to eight weeks Sophie travels to either London or New York to look around the shops (high street and luxury) and vintage markets to gather inspiration. Before she leaves for her trip, she prepares her range break that details the number of tops, dresses, skirts, pants and jackets that she is required to design by her sales team and customers (retailers), who require certain combinations of tops and bottoms. She also looks on WGSN for trend analysis and reports in order to focus her shopping. Overseas, she goes to the main shopping precincts, saying:

I go vintage shopping as well, sometimes I find nice scarves which we will use for prints, some shapes which we could use as well. And also to check out all the other stores, like H & M and Zara which kind of fit in with the Label C3, sort of a similar style and customer. And I will buy anything that I think would help with details, embroideries and things like that (Sophie 2011).

She shops for three days, and in the evenings examines her shopping finds and hand draws her designs. She needs to make sure her shopping finds meet all the trends that she flagged in Australia. She says:

I get given a range break, it will say things like: for April I will need ten pants, twenty dresses, five skirts. Everything needs to be in stories, that's just a guide, the range break, I have to design in outfits. So if I design a top it has to have a bottom. [They] have to be in stories, so if there's a bohemian story, I need to make sure there's enough pieces in there (Sophie 2011)

She emails her designs to Australia, where the production manager will add them to specification sheets and translate any notes into Chinese, then emailed back to her.

Sophie then travels to the Chinese factory (sometimes stopping off in Hong Kong for further shopping). At the factory, she goes through all the styles with the production team, and then shops in the fabric markets to source the garments’ fabrics.

Back in Australia, she will conduct fittings of the samples, posted from the Chinese factory. These are adjusted, and then posted back for further changes. Six weeks later, Sophie goes through the process once more and leaves for her overseas trip. She said:

Sometimes I get a bit delirious, because of the hours we have to work and stuff... when I am on my trip I just have to know what I'm designing, (taps head) it's just has to be up here because there is really no time. I normally have three days, so I’m still drawing throughout that time (Sophie 2011).

Sophie’s design process is undertaken at a frenetic pace, in which approximately 80 styles are determined alone over three evenings, in a hotel room. Also, the higher pricepoint of Label C3 means that unlike the discount fast fashion labels, Sophie cannot engage in direct copying of styles. She said:

I've worked for a lot of companies that do [knock-off] but you get in trouble um I mean I'm a designer - I studied design - so I like to design it and not just copy because any one can do that... if you just copy it straight up, most of the time other labels do the same thing, the cheaper labels, like your SES's, your Valleygirls, your Red Berry, and then you will have the same product as them, and then our customers [retailers] will come in and they will say 'oh you know, I've seen that in Surry Hills, all the little wholesalers in Surry Hills²¹. And you don't want that because they would be able to get it from them much cheaper than what they can get it from us, so we have to change it all (Sophie 2011).

Like the designers at Company A, Sophie is already disadvantaged through not being able to directly copy – she needs to add value through her design by presenting a variation on the aesthetics dictated by the larger trend stories.

The interview with Sophie revealed how fundamentally different the process for fashion design for sustainability (as described in Table 2.1, pg. 83) and the fast fashion design process are. Sophie barely has time to get through her existing

workload, let alone consider new approaches to design. Regarding sustainability, she said:

Sustainable... I honestly don't know... I don't even think about that really, honestly, because I don't have much time to design and get it all in to work.

It's pretty much just about what’s in fashion. For Label C3 it has to be on trend so I actually have to look at what's showing overseas and it HAS to follow those trends (Sophie 2011).

21 The problem of competition from the faster, directly copying, lower pricepointed Chinese wholesaler labels in Surry Hills, was also identified by Jane at Company A.

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While Sophie’s design process was solitary rather than collaborative, like Company A, of paramount importance was the need to stay close to trends. Her process revealed her implicit fashion knowledge and contextual knowledge that lies in knowing what the retailers need from Label C3, as well as how Label C3’s customers will respond. Sophie gains this knowledge partly through the retailers’

feedback, and partly in the more nebulous sense of sharing the ‘lifeworld’ of her consumer. Like many of the designers in Company A, Sophie is the same age and lifestyle demographic as the customer for whom she is designing. Following Aspers’

(2006) analysis, discussed in Section 4.3.1, this knowledge grants her an implicit insight into what her customer will want to wear.

Sophie’s fashion knowledge is gleaned chiefly from her travels and from WGSN.

The travels reveal the importance of place; in particular, the continued importance of the fashion cities in the northern hemisphere. In her studies of the aesthetic economy, Entwistle (2009, 2010) notes the vital importance of place in the transmission of fashion knowledge among high fashion buyers. Also, while designers can gather fashion knowledge through reading WGSN, this research is related only to intangible styles and aesthetics in the form of images. Hence Sophie must travel to see and buy the material garments that she will use for inspiration – she needs to handle the garments, see their finishes and their fit in order to translate these into her designs.

As her trips are only six weeks apart, this fact alone demonstrates the speed of change in the fashion system.