Line Development Project
What was the Ask?
Create a contemporary fashion brand that would fit into Crescala Collective. The brand must have an inspiration, 8 different looks designed by the team, textiles that are at least 70% cotton, financial backings, marketing advertisements and events, and a layout within a department store.
ABout the project
The line development class this semester was sponsored by Cottonworks. Our amazing professors secured a grant from them which enabled us to travel to New York City and to Cary, North Carolina to tour the Cotton Inc. headquarters. Cottonworks even came to see our final presentations along with our mentor, the CEO/Founder of The Crescala Collective, Jodi Sandman.
Meet the Team
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Avery Beam
GROUP MEMBER
Avery kept our group super organized and on track to meet deadlines. She always made sure that we all presented our best work. She was a huge help with our marketing section of the brand.
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Maya Yatim
GROUP MEMBER
Maya was the only design major in our group therefore she took the lead with creating our designs. She helped us with the more technical design information and with visualizing was we wanted.
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McKenna-Kate Gaudio
GROUP MEMBER
Kate was an integral piece of our group as she took the lead on our financials. Our business would not make sense if the financials did not work out. She always kept us in light spirits even when the work was hard.
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Sydeny Koval
GROUP MEMBER
Sydney has an amazing eye for graphic design and visuals. She helped design the presentation and create amazing mood boards throughout it. Sydney worked hard not only on this project, but other projects from different classes. She was amazing at balancing all of her schoolwork.
This our inspiration/mood board for the brand we created. Reminisce is a womenswear contemporary company based in New York City. Our inspiration is the feeling of being a young girl again. We wanted to channel how we felt as little girls playing dress-up to help us create fun and bold clothing for women.
Reminisce’s target market is women aged 35-60 years old who make $150,000 - $400,000 annually. She could have a job as a marketing manager, creative director, or executive position.
To go with our fun and playful brand we chose bright and vibrant colors. These colors evoke the nostalgia of dress-up and having fun with fashion as a child.
Textiles
Cottonworks required that our textiles included fabrics that were made of at least 70% cotton. Reminisce decided that we wanted to use as much cotton as possible as it is a more sustainable option than plastic.
REminisce designs:
Below is four of our eight designs for the brand. It’s easy to see that we brought the fun, bold colors of our childhoods into a very sophisticated yet playful silhouette.
Each of our designs were first sketched digitally and then created within CLO 3D software by me. (Wendy Benson)
TRIM SHEET
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Our team had to create a tech pack for one of the garments. We chose our lime green blazer jacket.
Juno Blouse
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We created cost sheets for each garment in our collection. This is an example of a cost sheet from one of our shirts.
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We had to mess around with these numbers quite a bit to get to the price that we needed to fit into the contemporary market.
VIvian Dress
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This is a cost sheet example of one of the dresses we created.
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We wanted our dresses especially to be on the pricer end so we were sure to use high end textiles and have our products be made in the U.S.A.
Bags & Tags
The Reminisce team wanted to be sure that our bags and tags matched the inspiration and feeling of our brand. We decided to offer simple garment bags to juxtapose the fun, big, and bubbly dresses that would go inside of them. The pink bag in the center of the slide is our delivery bag which can be used for online orders or PR packages. The bag on the far right is our paper shopping bag which has a design made in collaboration with an artist we plan to work with for an event. The hangtags and garment tags are very simple and include our secondary stick figure girl logo.
Our first event is in collaboration with a New York based artist named Michela Martello. She has illustrated for children's books plus her artwork aligns with Reminisce's colors and feeling.
Reminisce's second event is in collaboration with American Girl Doll. The event will be great for women within our target market that have children or grandchildren. We will create limited edition, miniature versions of our line for American Girl Dolls.
Reminisce has also decided to collbroate with Betsy Johnson to create accessories as our line only includes garments. We felt that Betsy Johnson perfectly aligned with our style of deigns. This first accessory is shoes that match the patterns of some of our pieces.
Betsy Johnson and Reminisce will also create jewelry together. These pieces are reminiscent of jewelry we used to wear as children. The big, plastic hearts and stone were a staple when playing dress-up.
Reminisce is a contemporary brand that would have a section in Bergdorf Goodman. These photos which were produced by AI, are just a few ideas for how that corner layout would look. We also created an Instagram page for marketing, and a website for shopping. Each of these are sure to tie back into our theme of fun colors and childhood nostalgia.
REFLECTION
REFLECTION
This project was the most challenging yet fun assignment I have ever completed. So much hard work went into this project and I am so proud of how well our group worked together and the end product! The photos and work shared within my portfolio is not even half of the final project. My team was extremely dedicated and we were constantly getting advise and mentorship from our professors and other professionals. I became really close friends with these girls as well and I am very thankful that we were placed together. This project really helped me grow as a person and professional. I learned so much about starting a brand, line development, financials, and I even taught myself how to use a new software (CLO 3D).