Laura is a creative designer with a keen eye for detail and take pride in her work from design to sample production. She has over four years industry experience since graduating from Cordwainers at The London College of Fashion in 2006. She is currently looking for a new and exciting opportunity to further develop her career. She believes the ultimate success of a product lies in it being design oriented yet also marketable. Being a self motivated person, she is hard working, creative, work well within a team, like to be kept busy and is not afraid of a challenge.

Laura worked with several companies throughout these years:

2011 Dasing Shoes as Temporary Ladies and Girls Footwear Designer where she did researching and designing trend driven commercial footwear for high street customers including New Look, Primark, Dunnes, Mothercare, Brantano, Littlewoods, Peacocks and Matalan. While here she took a development trip to China and Hong Kong (visiting factories and developing designs from customer meetings). As well as shopping/research trips to New York, Paris, Amsterdam. Antwerp, Milan and Florence.

2010 Marion Ayonote as Freelance Ladies Footwear Project, designing a luxury footwear range made by highly skilled craftsman in Italy.

2009 – 2010 Anthropologie as Sales Associate, she enjoyed being a part of the opening team for the 1^st Europe store in London and learning about the brand.

2009 – 2010 Ipilya as Freelance Ladies Footwear Project, designing and developing the first footwear collection for this upcoming Ladies Footwear Brand to be made in Italy, using luxury materials focusing on new concepts and higher price points.

 2009 –2010 Trendstop as Freelance Fashion Trend spotter, researching and photographing current trends on the high street from fashion to art and graffiti and finding people with an innovative fashion sense to photograph for the street style section of the website. Also visiting shops and markets on a regular basis and keeping Trendstop up to date with new fashion products.

2008 – 2009 Urbancode Footwear as Ladies Footwear Designer. She was recruited to establish and develop Urbancode’s first ladies footwear collection for Autumn/Winter 2009/2010 to compliment the existing handbag and accessories range and:

• Working closely with the Handbag and Accessories Designer on trend analysis, design specs and new prototypes.
• She created mood boards, sourced leathers and bought a variety of kits from a ballet pump to low heels, a platform high heel to flat and heeled boots. She developed her designs in factories based in India and Portugal.
• She worked with the factory directors on all development and prototypes being in every process from visiting the last maker, outsole factory, heel factory and finalising the box design with the shoe box maker.
• Visiting the Garda shoe fair in Italy, meeting prospective factories to work with; from Italy, Spain and Brazil.
• As part of the promotion for Urbancode Footwear, she designed limited edition keyrings with the company logo, which were handmade in the Portuguese factory. These were distributed to buyers and customers to help promote the brand.
• The collection was launched at the Bread and Butter show in Barcelona in January 2009, and then followed the UK launch at the Pure trade show in London in February 2009. The shoes were bought by retailers across the globe – from Japan to Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and boutiques across the UK.
• Successfully bringing together the first footwear range for Urbancode. She was also recommended to be nominated, for the Footwear Friends Design Award by a leading bespoke shoemaker.

2006 – 2008 Peter Black / Law Trading Footwear Supplier as Ladies Junior Footwear Designer. Whilst she worked at Peter Black they were a key footwear supplier to Marks and Spencer. Working for a company that supplied shoes to a major fashion retailer was significant, as she got to see the importance of working to a brief to achieve the critical path dates with catwalk reflection always in mind.

• Whilst here she designed across Limited, Autograph, Footglove, Widefit, Core, Career and Per Una ranges. She often worked alongside the handbag and accessories team co-ordinating products from key trends for M&S.
• Her designs ranged from fast fashion to casual products, formal to evening shoes, slippers, socks, lining, insole, and outsole designs.
• Many of her styles were bought and featured in magazines and internet articles. Her first design to hit the shelves was a shoe boot that was developed from a vintage boot she found whilst visiting Portobello market in London. This was extremely popular and sold in two colour ways: Black and Brown. This one shoe made the company a profit of over £1,100,000 and was one of Marks and Spencer’s bestselling shoes that year.

• Whilst working on the Law Trading side – she would research upcoming fashion trends from the catwalks to make commercial designs for accounts including: Next, Tesco, Debenhams, Fat Face, The White Company, Accessorize Jane Norman and Faith.
• Trend/catwalk research, producing all mood/colour/material boards. She completed shop reports as well as kept up to date with current UK and global trends.
• Her design area included casual and formal ladies footwear. Her range was broad and covered fast fashion, comfort, casuals, boots, career, evening, beach, party and everyday. She produced design work from hand drawings, technical spec sheets and colour scan cads.
• She worked closely with buyers and dealt with factories in China on a daily basis.
• Visiting factories in China. This was a brilliant learning curve for her, as she got to see her own samples being made and address any issues with sample development with the factory. It was also great for her to visit the Chinese markets and be able to source materials and trims for her designs.

Laura’ skills

• Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Word and Excel.
• Moderate speaking Italian.
• Factory Experience – China, India, Portugal.

Interests

Travelling, photography, socialising with friends, visiting exhibitions, learning Italian, surfing, films, and reading trend and fashion magazines. She is very creative and enjoy making baby shoes and accessories at home using her industrial leather sewing machine.