I’m the Senior Designer at Sprayway, but I’m not a mountaineer and I wasn’t taken out walking in the mountains from a young age, in fact quite the opposite considering I was bought up in one of the flattest parts of the country - Essex! there got that out of the way.  The most I did was to go walking in the New Forest on our summer holidays til the age of 10.  I’ve arrived where I am from a more creative angle, and the sports that I’ve experience or still do regularly - mountainbiking, running, hill walking, powerkiting, climbing etc all got picked up along the way and I wouldn’t be without them now as using the kit that I design is the easiest way to find new ideas, or find faults with current ones.

I’ve always had an interest in making things, my nan was a seamstress, and most of my clothes as a child were hand made by my nans or my mum, so making clothes is something that I’ve been capable of from quite a young age.  I didn’t really think about it as a career until the final year of A levels and realised that to get to a Fashion degree, I needed to do a Foundation course in Art and Design first.  This covered everything from Graphics, 3D, Fine Art, Textiles and Fashion to Photography and Art History.  I managed to get a place at Newcastle Poly for a 4 year BA(hons) in Fashion Design.  This taught me the basics of creating garment patterns, fabrics, finishing, garment construction and textiles.  After several work placements during my 3rd year on the course, I was a bit disillusioned with the fashion world and had become interested in fabrics that had some kind of performance characteristics.  This lead me to finding out about the Masters in Performance Sportswear Design at Derby Uni.  It was only in it’s 2nd year when I started, so was very new to the sportwear industry too.  This course took me onto the next level teaching me more in depth about fabrics - their make up and how and why they work, cutting patterns for movement, market research etc I did some work placements whilst on the course too - working for a licensee of Rockport in Stockholm, then for Polaris, then Rox and Design IQ (as they’re now called).

I learnt a lot from the course, but it was still a struggle to find a job in the trade, it took me about 5 months before I started my first proper job.  I sent out CV’s to everyone that I wanted to work for and applied to the jobs that I could find.  Then I got a phone call from Nick Brown at Paramo, and I was given the opportunity to put all that I’d learnt into practise.  It was a steep learning curve, and I made a lot of mistakes, but I enjoyed working there and learnt so much.  I then headed North to Montane, and stayed for 6 years.  The company changed a lot whilst I was there.  I had, what I would class as the luxury of having a factory on site.  I could design a product in the morning, make the pattern and then be sitting with the sample machinist in the afternoon as she made it up - telling me what would and wouldn’t work in production.  We then started to move production to the Far East as we couldn’t keep up with demand and prices in the UK.  The factory in the UK had teams of 4 working on garments, yet in China there were different people for for pretty much every operation.  So each person at each stage was an expert in what they did - putting in zips, finishing pockets, hem drawcord tunnels etc Our girls in the UK couldn’t compete on the finishing quality, though not without trying.  We eventually closed the factory and moved all the rest of our production to China.  It was a sad day.  My role at Montane was varied as it was a small company.  I designed and developed new products, sourced fabric and trim, chose the colours and organised lab dips, co-ordinated the sampling - working with the factories and fabric suppliers, signed off the preproduction samples, liased with fabric companies for bulk fabric ordering, QC’d the products when the bulk orders arrived in the uk, organised rectification if they were wrong, did the drawings for the workbook, sent products out to Journalists etc etc I enjoyed my 6 years at Montane, but really wanted to be more focussed on design and be less involved in the other stuff.  Which is why I then moved to Sprayway.

Sprayway is a bigger company, and I am in charge of a small team of product developers, fabric technician and designer.  I have to research the market, the competition, the customer, colour, fabric, detail, trends as well as staying on top of technical developments, then I design and specify my products to send out to the factory and then feedback on the prototypes. I am also involved in writing text for our workbooks, trying to keep costs down,  and working with our distributors abroad to create specific styles for them.  There are a long list of other things including regular trips to the factories and admin stuff that I do which is all part and parcel of my job.

Working with factories abroad is different.  Lead times are longer, and you have less direct contact with the people developing your products, however they do have access to more machinery and new technology that would have been too expensive to buy for our factory in the UK at Montane.  Ultimately, we specify what they make, and control the quality from the UK.  Sometimes developing something a little tricky is more difficult and takes longer but if there is a difficult detail we will mock it up in the Uk and then send it over for the factory to copy.

Designing outdoor kit is like trying to find an unending solution to a problem, which from my point of view is great as I like the challenge of it.  It’s quite rewarding when you see your products being worn, or reviewed or being bought every season by more and more stores.  Not sure if there’s anything else that I’d rather be doing careerwise: I’m being creative, designing clothing, and getting out and testing it.  It’s a job I enjoy doing and if I didn’t enjoy it I wouldn’t be doing it.

More info here