Van Journal: Buying Fabrics and your customer

One of my favourite parts of designing - the buying of the fabrics and trims. The easiest part to get carried away, the hardest part of being selective for your customer base, and the easiest part of letting you mind wander and having so many ideas.

buying fabrics for Vanjo

Sometimes buying fabrics though can be the hardest part, when you realise that in your basket are fabrics that clash (not in a good way) and you know that you won't be able to made a collection out of them. It's liking going food shopping and only buying snacks, great at the time but later you realise you have nothing that goes together.

So with my basket full of pink tulle and yellow cotton jersey with a graffiti print on it, it was a quick look at my Pinterest board to see my defined customer then I could begin to edit.

if you haven't started a Pinterest board I would truly recommend one. I have a private one set up as well as my public ones which I pin images to that represent my brand and my ideal customer. For some of you what you buy will be easy, but for me, since I freelance for other companies as well, I'm not often submerged into my own range for long, so can find myself pulled in different directions. Anyway back to what's on my brand Pinterest board, rarely is it lingerie, I find images of what others have designed a distraction to what I'm trying to design. So it's mainly full of what I think my ideal customer would buy and go in other areas of her life, it's also got fabric ideas on too.

Buying fabric and recording them

I find that as you do over the weeks, when you look back even if you hadn't pinned in pattern or with an idea, one starts to emerge.

With my ideas and shapes of lingerie drafted out (but who knows they might all change when I've sampled them up). buying fabric is my next step. 

With Vanjo I'm still aiming to source as much ethical fabric as before, so this means supporting  UK suppliers, and buying reclaimed fabrics and trims. My first haul of fabrics and trims were from Sewing Chest - with a couple emails back and forth to confirm where items had been sourced from my package arrived, and it was great to start designing new shapes. Before anything got made, I noted down codes of the lingerie and prices in case I needed to buy it again and for when I costed it. I would so recommend doing this, otherwise you're looking back and forth for information. In the designs packs there is a sheet for this if you don't want to draft out your own.

So since receiving the fabrics and trims, I have been busy sewing, aiming to get everything fitted and signed off soon, so can then plan the full range properly.