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Originality and creativity are the trademarks of a successful fashion or textile designer. You know how difficult it is to come up with designs that will be accepted by your audience. You invest time, energy and resources to design something original, and the last thing you want is for someone to rip off your design, create copies and make a profit off it.

Your business may have high ethics and strong, sustainable practices in place, but how do you prove them to your customers? In an increasingly complex world, transparency is valued more highly than ever, and Provenance is offering a technology solution for brands wanting to demonstrate their impact with credibility.

We speak with Provenance's incredible founder Jessi Baker, who was awarded an MBE earlier this year for her services in Global Supply Chains. 

Circular Systems™ are a material science company that have developed new fibres from waste materials. In this lesson, we chat with Linus Mueller who heads up the R&D and IP teams at the company, to find out what their fibre made from post-industrial (pre-consumer) textile waste is all about, along with what goes into the research and development of such materials as Texloop™. We also discover the importance of intellectual property and patenting for material science companies and their innovative solutions.

In this 15 minute lesson, designer and maker Philippe Holthuizen gives his insight on how 3D printing can work for footwear, particularly within a sustainable setting. His brand FUSED Footwear offers super cool sneakers all printed with his own tinkered with 3D printer, all of which can also be returned and recycled. Philippe provides honest advice on launching and growing a business that offers a niche product, including what you should consider when it comes to scaling, pricing, finding your audience and how to grow as a creative business person.

Experienced footwear designer Stefan Mathys, and now co-founder of repairable footwear brand VYN, joined us to give insight into how footwear design and production costs work in reality for mid-range fashion footwear brands. He gives thoughts on how a footwear brand or line could be implemented to consider the full life cycle of materials and product, how to engage customers with repair practices, and the ways in which fast fashion brands could adhere to similar systemic design shifts. This is a longline 40 minute interview that dives deep in to many questions, and will leave you feeling inspired and motivated, as well as better equipped in knowledge when it comes to repair models.

Malin Ekengren is a denim specialist with years of experience designing for well-renowned denim brands, including Levi Strauss & Co. In this bitesize 7 minute lesson, Malin takes you through how to conduct good research so that your product is rooted in the past, but innovates for the future. Though Malin has a background in denim, this advice is applicable to all product design research.

This webinar was edited and renamed with permission by Transformers Foundation, where this presentation originally aired as part of TransformersED, and by Malin Ekengren themself.

Thumbnail image: from Malin's presentation

Sue Barrett is the founder of Denim Forum, a creative strategy, trend and advice agency focussed on helping creative businesses and brands unlock their purpose to anchor their business for growth. In this 11 minute lesson, Sue takes you on a journey of trend forecasting, and how you yourself can profile customers to build a brand that can sell, be trusted, and be desired. Though Sue's background is denim-product focussed, the inspiring learnings from this presentation cross over into all product categories, and especially those where consumer tribes are more notable, for instance, footwear.

This webinar was edited and renamed with permission by Transformers Foundation, where this presentation originally aired as part of TransformersED, and by Malin Ekengren themself.

Thumbnail image: from Denim Forum