Kate spade
The following includes a variety of work from my time as a freelancer designer at Kate Spade (April 2019 - Present). I was originally hired as a designer to work on mainline SLG products. Then promptly added to the mainline handbag design team as well as the outlet handbag design team. My scope of work included ideation for mainline handbag and SLG projects, creating technical documents both for design samples and market samples, as well as creating 3D color-ups for concepting and linesheets.
Mainline sport knit ideation project. I was very excited to get to work on this project start to finish throughout all the steps of ideation including reference imagery/market analysis and a few hardware sketches, color & material placement options, and specific material research options, with the last step being creating the technical design document for the first round of samples. I did get to see this project through and do the sample revision documents up until the market sample. There was a tote/bucket bag and backpack body put into works with this new material - I’ll focus on both below.
Mainline handbag ideation, this example is for a design sample of a new body needed to fill an update to their existing successful Molly tote. To make the tote serve as a the a similar function, but with a more modern aesthetic and shape vs. the existing NW shape. The first step was to do some market research on existing NS shapes in which I put a clear visual deck together to compare what exists both size wise and modern/simple realms across higher fashion brands and more direct competitors.
SLG ideation - this specific project was to create oversized bag hangtags for the customer to be able to add some extra flare and/or to customize their handbag. There was some initial direction to a few of these concepts, but overall I was given a lot of freedom to create new and exciting ways for the brand to be represented and flaunted.
Technical design documents, this specific example was for a design sample in which I actually came up with the material technique when the material (acrylic) was presented to me by the design director. I’ve had some experience with experimenting with acrylic and specifically neon acrylic where when you etch or cut this material you achieve a glowing effect as well as some interesting shadows casted by the glowing/etching. This was an exciting project to work on and I was very happy to see that it made it to market.
3D looking color-ups, these were used instead of CAD color-ups in order for the idea to be represented more realistically - which was helpful for those without a visual creative background viewing the line. I was able to help the team out by I streamlined the process for the rest of the team/freelancers. The method to do this version of visual ideation was initially taking team members ~1-2 hours per colorway I introduced them to a faster method and taught them all so it took each team member ~2-15 minutes. This showed my ability to be productive in addition to having the best interest in the rest of the team to be more productive.
