I'm moving to London

(This post comes to you from a very tired blogger after two weeks of crazyness and excitement.)

 After some of the craziest weeks in my life I'm absolutely beside myself to say that I'm achieving something I've wanted for years and moving to London for at least 4 months while I do an internship. While I am absolutely buzzing to start something completely new and exciting I have to admit that the preparation to ensure that I can survive while I'm there has been exhausting to say the least and in a way has forced me to make some very grown up decisions. (I've surprised myself if I'm being honest!)

I'm so lucky to have family down there who are understanding and supportive of this opportunity so much that they're allowing me to live with them for the duration and without them it's safe to say this wouldn't even be happening and it's been the key factor in my decision to go through with all this. Basically I'll be paying them back for their generosity for the rest of my days.

So here's the breakdown of how the last two weeks have went...

Just a little over 2 weeks ago my cousin advertised a 4 month internship vacancy at her work. Now I am never one to take risks and the fact that this job is only temporary weighed heavily on my mind before I made any kind of decision about applying for the job. However, after a chat with family and assessing my own feelings towards where I am in life and in my career just now it was decided that I'd have to take the leap to really achieve what I want. Cue a mixture of immediate excitement and panic.

As it turns out, I got the job so taking the risk has paid off but now I was faced with the prospect of moving to London, saying goodbye to my frends and family and somehow packing all of my bedroom into as few suitcases as possible. This is where I had to seriously make sacrifices and mildly began to panic.

In the following week I decided that my main aim was to make as much money as possible to ensure a smooth transition to living in London, the last thing I want when I move is to have to phone up my folks and ask for money, it's not exactly the new responisble Hannah I have in mind!

 So in order to maximise money making potential I've basically sold everything I possibly could. I've sold clothes, furniture, old playstation games and DVDs, my friends have helped me clean out my room and in turn they walked away with a few items each that they like and that I won't be able to take with me. The car has been loaded up with older items to be recycled and I've even sold some of my Harry Potter items to help give me that little extra cash for when I get down there. That part sucked. The good thing is that my room is now so empty that I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere with all the packing!

To also ensure that I make as much money as possible while I'm living in London I decided right away that I was going to have to get a second job. Luckily this turned out to be one of the easiest things I've done in the run up to the move, my current work have transferred me down to a store in London to work at the weekends and it only took a 10 minute phone call! At this point the panic started to subside and was instead replaced by doubt, things were working out all too well for my liking... It all seemed a bit too 'easy.'

So I write this to you on a Monday as I prepare to move on Friday to tell you all that it really does pay off to take risks, I'm extremely lucky that I have family down there to help get me on my feet but the bottom line of the next 4 months is that I'm moving to work not to have fun and go sight seeing. I will be working 7 days and simultaenously trying to save up for what happens after. I've not even moved yet but a lot has had to be sacrificed in the short term to help in the future and overall I genuinly do have a great feeling about this. I think it'll be important to constanty remind myself of why I chose to do this and risk everything on a 4 month job but at the same time be thankful that my current job will provide me with a more long-term financial security. I've already come to terms with the fact that I could be heading back home to Scotland in 4 months if it all doesn't work out but the experience of working in London is all too good and too valuable to my career in the future to pass up. 

I think to round this post up I'll just say that this journey is something that's going to continuously be documented on this blog and I look forward to writing about the internship and how it develops. Whilst I feel like I'm currently in a great headspace where I'm ready to grab work by the balls and really pull my weight for the next 4 months I also have slight negtive niggles in my mind as anyone would when they move to a new city and essentialy lose such close connections to family.

I guess we'll see where this chapter in my life takes me!

Wish me luck!! 

Why I chose to pursue Fashion (and why it's getting harder to love it)

I am always fascinated by people and how they came to pursue their careers, infact i'm even curious about why they don't pursue something i'll think they're really good at and so I want to talk to you about how I got into fashion and why I'm currently in a love/hate relationship with it. 

I was always a very tall child, i'm the tall one in all my old primary school photos and at the age of 9/10 America's next top Model was huge on the telly and I instantly fell in love with the whole idea of becomming a model and wearing gorgeous dresses for a living. I'll be totally honest, there was no way in hell that little obsession was going to come true for me but I did rock a fake runway in my house whenever I got the chance so I guess we'll call it good characted building for a young mind with long legs.

So anyway that blatantly never happened but as my interest in finding out as much as possible about these models grew, I found myself on MTV watching 'The Fabulous Life of...' where they would show you all of the designers celebrities and models wore and soon I found my obsession with designers grew.

In school I was always good at Art and as I progressed to highschool I was presented with Craft and Design which turned out to be an even bigger success. Whilst Art at my school had a design part with it I always felt they went down unlogical paths and it wasn't so much about functionality of clothing but about how out there it could be which to be honest went against everything I felt about clothes at the time. Craft Design however was more my thing, functionality all the way with logical design so I took the ideals of my craft class and applied them to art and beautiful things happened. These two were definitely my best classes at school, I remember actually being excited to do the homework for them as well which was a rarity so I poured my heart and soul into them.

By this age my life was Vogue and E! I spent my evenings and weekends looking at models (some things never change) and started to find out about the world of online fashion blogging. I remember seeing Tavi and Style Rookie and having my mind blown at the knowledge of a 12 year old and really stepped my game up in the fashion stakes. I had to know as much about each designer as I could with the tools available to me and so I started my own blog and got to work. It was also at this age that I started obsessing with non-fiction fashion books. My mum and dad would find me in waterstones in the art section pouring over fashion drawings and begging them to buy me the books and to this day I still collect as much as I can if I can afford it.

University was where things started to get complicated, I went to a School in the Scottish Borders and studied Garment Technology whilst working part time in a cafe to fund a lifestyle I blatantly couldn't afford. I very quickly established that there were parts of the fashion industry I loved and parts I couldn't stand at all and the same could be said for the people. I was waking up at 5am to leave for class and getting home late at night blearly eyed and frustrated that the same process would happen all over again in under 12 hours time but regardless, I tried to stay positive and as drunk as possible in order to cope.

Fashion has a lot of pretentious people in it, sadly so did my university at times, especially as we progressed through the years and things got more competitive. I longed for the weekend and to go back home to see my friends and go out to a club, making the most of the fun times before going back to to 5am starts on the Monday.

 The classes could also make me feel like a salmon fighting it's way upstream at times. Pattern cutting was 1000000000% not for me. Too much maths and numbers and stress, not eough time etc. I hated it, I remember having to really psyche myself up in the morning to get dressed and face the fear of failure I had with it. 

Design however still gave me the satisfaction it had all though highschool as well as specification writing which was also a love of mine from my craft classes so I clung to these in my last year to help battle my hatred for just about everything else at the time. Whilst I had classes I loved it felt a million times better when I'd manage to somehow pull a miracle from somewhere and get B in a pattern cutting class. That called for a celebratory glass of wine!!

By this point my love of fashion isn't sounding too fantastic however one thing that continued throughout the years at university was reading online blogs, seeing pictures in the magazines and keeping up to date with all the latest on E! which I swear was and still is an absolute oasis in my life. I had to keep reminding myself that whilst some areas of the industry drove me insane and frustrated me, there were other areas I absolutely excelled in, I just had to find a job that allowed me to pursue them all after university was finished.

It was at this point I spoke to a careers adviser and found out about garment technologists and the work they carry out in the industry. I got a mentor in the form of the form of the amazing Lindsay McKerchar and finally it felt like I had a direction to go in after I got my degree, another target in the distance to aim for but I soon found out that a piece of paper wasn't going to get me the dream job I always wanted. 

I graduated university and found myself as a visual merchandiser at the store I worked at part time through Uni. For a while I felt elated that I'd gotten a full time job in the fashion industry doing something I love but there were days where I still felt like I could achieve more. My job became less creative and more 'point to a wall and paint it the colours they tell you' plus by this point I was starting to get really frustrated with retail in general and the lack of good wages/progression they offered you. I'll be honest here, retail wages are some of the poorest out there, If I wanted to really make something of myself it would have to be somewhere else and not in an environment where people would say 'You're so young, you shouldn't spend your life in retail.' That freaked me out a bit. 

I stopped sewing, I couldn't sit down and concentrate long enough on one design to make it into a half decent outfit. My new blog, which was starting to take off, was suddenly uninteresting to me and I stopped caring about  fashion magazines and TV that I just ignored it all. It wasn't that I
hated fashion It was just that by this point I felt I'd wasted 4 years at university to end up in a sector that I could have worked in right after high school and therefore I began to feel really down and  resented my job. 

(This is where this post starts to take a little turn for the better.)

I should try and end this piece on a high note and reassure other fashion students reading this that it's not all doom and gloom and I promise you I will. I may work in a job that I really struggle to love right now but I remind myself that it is relatable to my degree, it is experience in the field. I concentrate on the things I'm good at and have taken steps to get back to loving them again. I've found the names of every scottish clothing manufacturer and I'm sending them my CV in the hopes that I can get experience doing what I originally set out to do for university. I've gotten back into this blog so that I can continue to talk to you all out there and remind myself that it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to get to a place where you can look back and feel that you've really achieved something and this blog gives me that. I've also just pulled out my old sketchbook and I'm about to get my pencils out and start doing what originally made me fall in love with fashion - designing- and I'll be keeping you updated on that. 

If you're in a similar position or went through similar feelings at University leave a comment below because I would love to hear from you or hear any advice you have on how you tackled it and got to a place you're really happy with and if you've been a sport and actually read all of this extremely wordy post then I want to thank you for your time also!! I just want to remind people that it pays to look at your situation in the bigger scale of things and more importantly remember why you chose the path in the first place because that's what's currently keeping me going.

Broonylou

 

Visual Merchandising - Model Store

I'm finally back with another post focusing in a bit more detail about the job of a visual merchandiser, it's been a while since I posted any photos of our displays and hard work in store so this is the perfect opportunity to share with you what I've been up to!

So my job these last few weeks has become increasingly hectic due to Model Store judging. 

Model Store for me and my job is when we as a visual team work tirelessly to make our store look the best it possibly can for customers, staff and the like and after many weeks of prep someone from high up within the company comes out and judges us on several criteria.

My job as a visual merchandiser involves presenting well thought out mannequins that were pinned well, dressed appropriately to the stock on the mat, create various hotspots throughout the store at key sightlines to promote stock within the store and change over our windows to designer stock which would encourage customers to come into store. We were also doing general maintenance such as cleaning, painting and touching up mannequins to make them look pristine in condition. 

Aspects such as colour flow, power of three, trends and layout were all key in the process to ensure the customer journey was carried out consistently through the store and looked chic. 

Last year one of our big criticisms was that we went over the top with our displays and as a result they were too busy and detracted more from the stock within the store rather than enhance it. 

Below I have a whole bunch of photos to share with you all, showing you the standard we set this year and I'll describe underneath what we were trying to achieve to explain to you all in better detail because it can sound a little confusing. 

So here you go! My stores model store displays for S/S15! If we've done our job properly you should look at these and immediately think "oooh wheres that stock?!"

Our main Safari tend catwalk 

Priority One window, the blues and stripes trend 

70s hotspot 

Swimwear mannis, note that the blue and red colours flow up to the handbags at the far end of the walkway (colour flow) 

Our Wedding Gifts hotspot. Lots of power of three 

A home hotspot, again lots of power of three and repetition, good colour flow between the products 

A hotspot at out luggage department to promote sales 

One of our bed displays 

Another bed display 

Collection formal first catwalk 

Collection formal second catwalk 

One of the lingerie hotspots 

Ted Baker 

Lingerie pillar with a display on the top 

Another angle of the Safari trend catwalk (notice how the floral print is continued throughout the mannis) 

Rocha manni display, good colour flow through mannis to match back wall merchandising and the height difference creates interest 

A shoe hotspot 

BDL mannis

Blues and stripes hotspot at the top of the escalator (this continues the story from our front window into the store) 

Jasper hotspot (notice all the blue?)

Behind the hotspot at the top of the escalator (rails have been added to the clothes can be shopped immediately after seeing the mannis) 

Toddler boy hotspot

Girls hotspot at height to draw attention 

Swimwear hotspot, good symmetry here 

Young fashion, mannis placed beside each fixture wearing the clothes to promote sales 

Same again 

Same principle but beside a graphic rather than a fixture 

Tropical hotspot 

Henry mannis, situated at various heights to create interest, good colour flow 

Mother day hotspot in the lift area, lots of power of 3 

Hotspot at the bottom of the escalator with shoppable rails 

Side view of the hospot, notice the detail on the catwalk continues up the wall 

Mens catwalk, maroon and blue colour flow 

Mens suits catwalk using staggered height to create interest 

Purple catwalk 

Pale blue young fashion mens display at height 

Mens shoppable hotspot at the back of the escalator for our mac trend 

So you may have realised that a lot of blue was projected around our store this year, Dark blues in womenswear, teals in home and the brighter blues in our young fashion areas. This helps carry a shopper through the store and is pleasing to look at. There was a lot of good merchandising in the store using these colours to enhance the journey as well but I have no photos of them.

If there's a certain display you like or want to comment on leave your thoughts down below!! 

Debenhams Press Show - Day 2

DAY 2- MORNING SET UP 

I can't remember the last time I slept so well. After all the commotion and hard work yesterday brought I made sure I had an early night and was well-rested for the chaos of finishing the set up for the press show. 

I was of the impression that the second day would be all hands on deck and a little bit manic but because of how much work we done the day before the day had a more relaxed vibe. By this point everyone had spent some time together and was feeling a lot more comfortable about the situation in hand so we were all working around each other and making plans for the evening ahead which was great and created such a chilled out atmosphere to work in.  

The morning was taken up mostly by mannequin dressing and minor alterations to the clothes and luckily the bags me and Kayleigh needed for our two accessories shelves arrived so we set about making them our priority in the morning, photos of the two shelves appear below. 

 Things really started to come together when the catwalk seating went in simply because of all the space it filled. You got a really good idea after that of how the evening was going to go and where everything was etc. 

 As the morning gave way into the afternoon we had photographers arrive, interviews being conducted and the lighting was finalised. Stylists also arrived along with their interns to sort out models outfits etc so as the day wore on the hall got more and more crowded and we became more aware of how little time we had left. The negative side to there being so many extra bodies as well was that the visual team got less time with the event organisers and therefore had to to rely a lot more on our gut feeling when making decisions. Turns out everything we done was bang on though which was great to hear. 

Below are the two accessories walls me and Kayleigh done. The first is of our sports luxe trend and the second is our tutti-fruiti trend.

I'll admit that these walls gave me such anxiety because they were literally on either side of the entrance and I was very aware of everyone watching us doing them so you really start to doubt yourself.

In those situations though you just have to try and convince yourself to trust in what you know and in the end we were both really happy with how things turnout out for us. We got a lot of really good compliments in the end and we were happy with the layout and the amount of products used so all in all we done the right thing by just trusting in what we know. 

 The sports luxe trend was by far my favourite, I love simplicity and so the black and white with the iridescent/monochrome colour scheme was right up my street. 

Tutti Fruti on the other hand was all pops of colour, eye catching tropical prints and shoes and really stood out from the rest of the room. From what I've seen on twitter and blogs from the evening this trend in particular was something people really gravitated towards and enjoyed looking at. Personally I was just thrilled none of the stock we velcro'd to the walls fell off as the day progressed! 

The two photos below are of the entrance to the hall and the catwalk area of the hall as a whole so you can see the progress from the photos of the previous day.

It looks sooo premium when you take in the two photos, hard to believe it was a totally empty hall before we were let loose on it! 

 We actually got away at 2pm in the afternoon which was great because me and some of the girls went out for lunch and cocktails (Which were really deserved) before going to the Glasgow store to get changed and glammed up for the evening event. 

THE EVENING EVENT

In true excitable employee fashion we arrived at the press show...super early and immediately regretted how keen we were to get involved in kicking back and enjoying our hard work. 

After awkwardly standing about still wearing our jackets we were thrilled to be handed champagne (which was filled up by waitresses when they got a tad low) and told to stash coats and bags under seats at the catwalk so we were sorted for the fashion show later on. Result!

We then set about searching through the rails and looking at the clothes whilst Scottish bloggers, Debenhams store managers and employees all filtered in the venue with some straggling models bringing up the rear. 

As the hall filled up with all these influential bloggers and employees from our work there was a real buzz of excitement. From what we could hear and were told people loved how the hall looked and all of the work we had put into the layout etc and being able to speak to people we would never usually have the opportunity to speak to was great! 

 Throughout the evening me and the girls got interviewed for some magazine which was one of the most awkward situations of my life having to tell someone who I was wearing (John Rocha leggings and a River Island blouse) and we also had a few situations where the camera man who was filming the event for Debenhams had turned around and was filming us which was also the most bizarre thing ever.

We actually got fantastic lighting for a group selfie since he decided it was something he wanted to film us doing. High-pressure selfies! 

 Some shots of everyone enjoying the event.

 And finally it was time for the fashion show! We took out seats and waited eagerly to see the clothes (which were already in stores but my store is quite small and doesn't receive all the lines) and we were not disappointed with what we saw! 

I tried to take photos of everything but sadly my phone just couldn't hack photographing models without blurring so I've had to make do with the few of mine that did work out. 

 I'm holding Kayleighs glass, I swear I'm not an alcoholic!! 

 See!

 My god the atmosphere in the room changed when the men hit the catwalk in swimwear 

Some of our safari inspired clothing, anchored by Star by Julien Macdonald.

Some Debut and Jenny Packham formal wear

Some of our new swimwear ranges.

 And to round up the successful 2 days and evening, some selfies to remind us of the fun we had! 

To give you a round up of how I felt after the two days I would say that any opportunity where I get a chance to take part in events that are above and beyond my usual position are extremely motivating and rewarding. It's also great to meet all the other visual members across parts of Scotland and spend some time getting to know them. After this and the training I was sent on I'm seeing a few of them quite often now! 

For me personally, getting to do things like this gives me a massive boost and a new injection of life into my job and if anything else it's just great to get out of Livingston for a few days and see a different city. 

Oh and did I mention there was free unlimited champagne?