Pip Jenkins, Design Director, JOHN SMEDLEY
Starting off as a design intern after winning a John Smedley competition, Pip’s design talent now sees her heading up the entire design team.
Pip’s creative eye and knitwear know-how sees her oversee both our menswear and womenswear collections and she has been instrumental in building our collections for both the classic and the fashion consumer.
Pip has an exceptional eye for knitwear construction, often challenging the status quo and developing new knitwear techniques，it will be seen prominently within signature collections at both London Collections: Men and London Fashion Week.
John Smedley is renowned throughout the world as a leader in the production of fine gauge knitwear products. Still family owned, the company continues to innovate while retaining the hand-crafted finishing techniques that have established its reputation for more than two centuries.
In this talk, I learned how Pip Jenkins went from design assistant, to designer, then to lead designer, and then to the head of design and MPDThe path to promotion seems smooth and natural, but only the designer herself knows how much effort we have to put in, as a design director, she needs to work together with the sales director, the finance director and the manager, the design director is no longer a single area of design work, communication and understanding with other departments has become very important.
She introduced us to her team and the structure of the company, and I learned that the company has 11 different business areas, which are maintained by a complete team, there are sales, retail stores, wholesale, purchasing, marketing, archives, inventory, website maintenance, etc., which is a huge system, and I think it is also what a mature brand should have, understanding the different responsibilities of different departments and together they form a huge system. She strives to be a head of sustainable design, making fabrics that are 90% biodegradable, and it is important to go digital in order to address the constraints in the production process and make the products more efficient.
She mentioned that their products have removed the last plastic on their clothes, labels, and even plastic bags for clothes, and they are constantly looking for new fabrics and fibers, they have a john spending Eco Cashman, this is 50% recycled, regenerating cashmere, and it is blended with 50%. other fabrics. This concept of sustainable development has given me a lot of inspiration, and it is true that the development of the fashion industry has brought many negative impacts on the environment, and how to weaken this impact and let the concept of recycling run through the raw materials and the production process of products, which is what we need to think about as designers and even future fashion leaders. So when I was working on my own project, I started to think about my fabrics and my cutting process from a new perspective, and I think sustainability should be a big deal.
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