What makes the cut?

only 50% of ideas make it to reality

Getting in “the zone” with design is like getting deep into a jigsaw puzzle that has no image on the box and no distinct end shape like a square or rectangle. It’s just totally open ended. You have no idea what you’re building or when it’s finished. The pieces somehow start to fit together, and you build. This may sound terrible to most people, but I love it.

At Abbey Glass, we have a talented team member, Stefanie Reinstein, that heads up merchandising. Surprisingly, it’s not a concept I learned in fashion school at RISD. We focused solely on creative exploration, design concepts by themes and technical work (sewing, draping, tailoring). Merchandising is the financially motivated, commercially conscious arm of a fashion business. Stefanie and I work hand in hand to build each seasonal collection, making sure there are equal parts inspiration, new trend forward ideas, and sale-ability.

A scene from our 1.5 hour, weekly design call might go a little like this:

I have 2 computer screens going at a time. One is so large it curves, it has a canva whiteboard document dominating half, showing all of our new fabric ideas, color concepts, and each silhouette we want to design into that fabric (it’s a beautiful mess). Tiled next to canva, I have photoshop where I’ve been messing around with some color combinations on a 3 color organza with a floral motif. I’ve got about 4 colorways contending for the hero organza of the month.

On my other screen I’ve got Stefanie’s and my Jr. designer, Maddy’s, face up on google meet. Maddy ironically is sitting about 20 feet from me in the design studio.

It’s 1:42pm, I’m still shoveling leftover couscous into my mouth in between sentences. I’ve got lunch blocked on my calendar before this meeting, but I never take it. Stefanie launches into our weekly puzzler “OK, so we’ve got 2 Charlotte Gowns already launching September, and we’ve got 1 coming before in August. And we’ve got this new silhouette that’s like Charlotte, the Cecelia Gown, but it has a slim sleeve, and she’s coming in September…so do we need one in October?”

Maddy holds up the organza fabric in front of her camera screen I’ve been working to recolor, the pièce de résistance.

“Ugh I LOVE this fabric, we neeeed to do it!” I’m blinded by the possibilities of a beautiful fabric. October is “holiday season” and it’s our best-selling special occasion dress. Also, a Charlotte Gown in organza always knocks it out of the park.

Meanwhile, we’ve got 15 other fabrics we “neeeed” Charlotte gowns sampled in, according to me, the head designer, which leaves us with too many ideas, too many products, almost every time. Often times my eyes are bigger than my sample budget.

This is why merchandising and editing is so important. We look back at last season, we use the best sellers as a jumping off point and try to determine why she loved them so much and recreate the magic. We commiserate and post mortem on the worst sellers, and then we edit.

What is SO challenging is, in order to be successful, we have to know what our customer wants before she wants it. We have to be in the right place at the right time with the right dress.

“Nope. We don’t need it” Stefanie confidently professes. We hem and haw, and then eventually move on to the next big puzzle piece, the Olivia Gown.

We say goodbye to at least 50% of what we design even before we get into sampling. This is because of over-assorting (too many ideas) or we sleep on an idea for a week and come back and it’s not as “timeless” as it needs to be in order to live in the Abbey Glass world.

We say goodbye to about 20% of ideas after they are sampled. Maybe the fabric isn’t the right weight, maybe the style doesn’t feel like “our customer”, or there’s just something better in the collection with the same end use. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, we only want to invest in the best of the best before it goes to market.

Here are some things that didn’t make the cut.

More soon xo,

Abbey