Fashion Designer: Nili Lotan

GOAL:
Help a high-end women’s fashion designer organize her studio to promote creativity and maximize production.

CHALLENGE:

Our client is a women’s fashion designer with a design studio/retail store in downtown Manhattan. Three times a year, she and her staff of eight (including a pattern maker, fabric cutter, two seamstresses, a sales team and a team in charge of operations) present the studio’s latest collection to retail stores and wholesale buyers. The process is essentially the same each cycle, but with no systems in place, the staff was spending hours looking for things. As a result, they were losing track of their creative work and missing opportunities to make sales.  

PROCESS:

Our team of specialists focused their efforts on creating systems to organize the two most important physical elements of the business: patterns and sample garments. 

First, we walked everyone through Julie's best-selling SPACE formula (Sort, Purge, Assign a home, Containerize, Equalize). Then, our specialists helped her build a "library" with beautiful white canvas containers to organize existing patterns, and we established a system for tracing pattern ideas in development. (We also unearthed valuable fabrics in the process!) In the sample area, we eliminated excess and irrelevant pieces, placed all the clothing in clear boxes, rearranged the layout and labeled items, making it easier to retrieve and return them.

PAYOFF:

Instead of wasting aggravating hours looking for things, the whole design staff can focus on creativity and profit.