You just never know where or when you might fold the next hint of inspiration into a winning design – the colors around an Icelandic fjord, the buckle on a vintage ski boot, the textures of a Mayan city, the scent carried on a breeze, the taste of tequila. Any one of those can become the beginning of something good. Actually, the taste of tequila – that never leads to anything good.
Travel and Mother Nature are certainly the greatest sources of ideas for me. Mother Nature always has a great design or two that we can pinch. Take for example, the palms from our recently released Pink Sands collection – Mother Nature did all the designing here, we just added our touches, the subtle movement in the Tiny Palm’s leaves, the placement of a check crystal, the depth of the gold ox finish. But don’t be fooled for a minute, those touches take months of work. It’s a process.
When I discover something that feels like the beginning of a concept, I will Skype, text, Slack or Zoom the design team back in our IH HQ. Excitedly, we will start to map out a mood board together. I will direct the story, which will then be transformed by the skills of our more trained designers. We are in constant communication during the inception phase, testing, assessing, examining. There’s lots of challenging each other back and forth.
Our conversations are then joined by the rest of the product team, our tech pack designer, our merchandiser, our head of product, taking the story and making it a reality – turning my idea into a collection.
Over the following months sketches, samples and supplies are reviewed, and reviewed and reviewed.
Sometimes Fed EX packages chase me around the globe as I jog from my home office to an event in Dallas and onto a board meeting in New York or an appearance in Philadelphia or a weekend with my kids in Savannah. Virtual meetings will be scheduled, and I will be holding my samples in my hand as the product teams hold another set in theirs. We sniff, touch and nearly lick the materials as we travel along this design journey.
From that first breeze blowing its tiny bit of inspiration to the finished pieces, we agonize over every last detail in the hope that we get it just right. And no tequila is involved.
X India