Playing With The Big Boys

Check us out in Harrods - Heathrow Terminal 5!.... Playing with the Big Boys! 

Take a closer look at the bags on our brand new site here: Sara Berman AW10 Bags

A Little Perspective

We are finally there. The panic has subsided and we are now firmly entrenched in the selling season and it has been going great guns! I think partly that is down to things looking up for the economy in general but also - may i say it - to the strength of the collection. As a designer there is always the natural inclination to be terribly critical but this season I can honestly put my hands up and say we have done a great job.

This is it - Autumn/Winter '10

I realised when looking back that I started this blog in the middle of the SS10 selling season which made me consider how much things have changed in that time for us as designers and the process we have followed this season. When you design a collection there is always pressure to do more. To make the collections bigger, to target other markets and fulfil every need as expressed by your buyers. This is natural and as a business person of course the instinct is to grow. However we found ourselves in a situation where our brand had grown so extensive in its product offer that we were over burdened by these huge collections and we finding less and less time to enjoy the process of design. I guess that is always the problem when you have a creative and business person in the same body but it wasn’t working for us anymore.

The recession allowed us to take a step back and see how much the design process meant to us in a very puritanical way and how much we wanted to go back to our roots. I think that for the first time in the history of our business it wasn’t about growth but about enjoying what we have built. 

This is me on what was a good design day. Very happy!

The success of our bag business showed us how valuable it could be to focus in on our strengths and how much we enjoyed the detail of design. So for AW10 we decide to indulge ourselves and really concentrate on the things that we loved designing as opposed to trying to tick all the boxes. Please understand that this is a pretty brave move. For years our buyers have been coming to us to see two full collections (Sara Berman and Berman Black) per season – each one a comprehensive, fully merchandised offer. In cutting back and presenting a basically egotistical offer of our favourite parts of a collection we risked alienating those buyers. Thankfully it seems to have paid off. The buyers who have seen the collection so far have been ecstatic! That sounds like a crazy word to use but when you have women dancing around the showroom throwing the clothes on themselves and doubling their orders it looks like a pretty enthusiastic reaction!

This season our collection is all about British. Our knitwear is made in a factory that actually makes for the Royal Guards. We have sourced real Donegal yarn-which is the only yarn still spun in the UK and is of such a beautiful quality it makes you proud that we can still make yarn like this. Our Harris Tweed coats are not only made of a yarn spun in the weavers own homes, but the coats and jackets themselves are made in the best factories still operating in the UK. Our silk dresses are also made in the UK and the whole vibe of the collection is British through and through. Think Dodi Smith's ‘I capture The Castle’ meets George Macdonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ with a dash of rock and roll thrown in.

Amiee channeling rock 'n' roll

We have also done a collaboration with British artist Dan Baldwin and are using one of his incredible paintings as a print for dresses and the lining of a couple of our Harris Tweed coats. Imagine opening up your coat to show one of Dan’s amazing paintings! The wonderful thing about this is that I have been a fan of Dan’s work for years (you can actually see one of his paintings in our AW09 mood board) and we came together over many shared ideas and inspirations. Terribly pure, honestly non commercial and a wonderful example for us we can indulge our love of art with our commitment to design. We want our customers to buy from us knowing that they are not buying just another mass produced item of clothing but actually a piece which contains a little soul.

The whole process has been an indulgent pleasure from start to finish. The funny thing is that although the collection has ended up being much bigger than we intended, we realised that we have gone back to the roots of what Sara Berman is all about. We found the pictures of my graduate collection from St Martins and realised that it was all leather, knitwear and tweed! Just goes to show that you will always do best that which you love most.

I Am The Mess-Meister

With five days to go until we start showing the AW10 collection, I thought you might like a very brief update on where things are at in the SB studio.

Frankly things are a little stressful. We haven’t seen one single solitary Harris Tweed finished piece yet. Of the 25 Harris Tweed samples which we need to have ready in five days, we have not got one.

Only 18 of our 30 bags samples are here in the studio. Six are on their way to the wrong address in London thanks to DHL Italiana stupido. Four are on their way from India and may or may not clear customs before Christmas. The remaining two are, in theory, going to be here the day before yesterday. Great.

The studio is covered in tweed, threads, bits of pattern and little gold lions waiting to be sewn onto sweaters-which are everywhere.The place is a bombsite and in the middle of all of it Amiee decides we need a new table. It arrived unannounced at 9am and as it turns out she may have misjudged the size of our studio and now we have a table which is the size of the whole showroom. Please understand that this is not a Good Thing when that showroom needs to be filled with samples not table. Feast your eyes on the monstrous thing below:

My house is also in a state of total disarray as I continue my archiving process. There is nowhere in my life where I am not surrounded by a daft amount of mess. I am the mess-meister.

The Italian silk CAD for our Dan Baldwin collaboration arrived yesterday. Only a month late.  Now they have to print it, send it and we have to make up the dresses and coats -all in five days. FIVE DAYS!

And to top it all off, I left my Val lightning stripe hat in a taxi last night.

And people wonder why designers are highly strung, emotionally fragile and teetering on the brink of a severe personality disorder.

Sampling And Other Demons

It has taken me 2 weeks to admit that January has started. New Year’s resolutions and an optimistic attitude are all well and good but there is no accounting for the sheer drudgery of the first two weeks of January. It just seems to be a bit of a slog which is not helped by the shitty weather (snow was fun for about 5 minutes but I am now running out of outfits which look OK with snow boots) and the enormous amount of work to get through in time for the start of the season at the end of the month. The timing is unfortunate as it has taken 2 weeks to get in to the groove and now it is suddenly upon us and we don’t actually have a collection as yet.

There are always changes to a collection at the last minute because design is a process. We will be going down a creative path and then suddenly it will just feel wrong. And once it is wrong it is wrong and it has to change. It isn’t a matter of getting it right from the beginning of the process because as a process it changes and what was right becomes wrong. Clear?

As of last week we cancelled half the knitwear… We are using an amazing Irish Donegal yarn which is actually made in Ireland (you would be surprised how many Irish Donegals are made elsewhere) and looks so good we want to use it for another story and on the other side, a knit piece that we thought would be central to the whole collection has come out like a bag of spanners so we have had to re think the whole knit section of the collection. We have changed 2 of our 5 bag stories in order to accommodate some fabulous gold hardware we found at the last minute and  so now we are waiting on 1^st stage samples to come back for those designs and 4 Harris Tweed coat patterns are not even in work as yet due to our inability to edit on time. With 10 working days until our first appointment this is not a good look.

There was a time when this would have filled me with fear, horror and a mounting sensation of hysteria. But as a 10 year veteran of fashion weeks I am aware that with a fair amount of stress, a pinch of panic and just a little help from the fashion fairies it will somehow happen and a collection will materialise in our studio.

For your amusement please see below for an idea of what it looks like in the SB studio when Amiee and I edit the collection.

A very serious discussion...

Which quickly descended into chaos

Trying to get to grips with the Harris Tweed swatches

On the upside the NYR’s are coming along swimmingly (See 2010 Resolutions 10 Clause Contract for a recap) …

1. I am starting the year with a Mc Sweeney’s short stories collection. I am a big Zadie Smith fan and she has a wonderful little tale in there.
2. I have cooked several sensational suppers these last couple of weeks, one of which included an apple and pear crumble which will go down in history and has been my complete and satisfying meal for the past 2 nights. Food is the new Fashion.
3. This very morning I met my new (and very buff) personal trainer. He is going to whip my m****** f****** arse into shape by Easter. Apparently if I cry every time I try to ease my aching body out of a prone position it is a Good Thing. 
4. Reminded of this again today when chasing samples from Italy. I can’t be certain but it is possible that I am getting the words for ‘I promise you will have them by Thursday’ confused with ‘I want to have sex with your sister’. 
5. The builder has been in to give a quote and there are clothes all over the house in various stages of the ‘archiving process’. I feel the need to stress the difference between ‘archiving’ and ‘tidying up’. Big difference. Huge. It is possible that my husband may divorce me over the mess. On the upside there is now a nice empty room for him to move into. 
6. Bring it on. I am off to Paris for the shows at the beginning of March which I love. I stay at the wonderful boutique hotel - Bourg Tibourg in the Marais which I have been going to for so long it is like a second home. 
7. I am trying. It’s the first month of the year. I have another 11 months to perfect this.
8. Did you see our photos? Got to laugh through the pain. 
9. Whatever. 
10. Super mum! Obviously. Even made pancakes this morning. I swear! Amazing how good a little Betty Crocker can make you feel about yourself!