Before emails. Before CAD. Before it was really called “global sourcing.”
My first designs sent over to China were faxed. Black and white line drawings, fed through a machine, travelling across the world to land in a factory in the Shandong province. And back from there would come the most beautiful embroidered samples — made by hands that had interpreted something I’d drawn at a desk in England, with nothing but skill, instinct and craft to guide them.
I had no idea, then, what I was part of. I just knew I loved it.
I have worked in the textile and product design industry for twenty-five years. I began as a designer, became a Design Director, and eventually built my own business ALSO Home Ltd — supplying some of the most significant names in British retail. Debenhams. House of Fraser. The White Company. Heals. Laura Ashley. John Lewis. Harrods. Neptune. And many more.
Much of this work has been largely invisible. Not by design, but because that is the nature of the supplier relationship — you are behind the product, not in front of it. The buyer gets the credit, the brand gets the sale, and the supplier goes back to the drawing board and starts again.
But as I have been reflecting recently, I can see more clearly now what that invisible work actually was. And it was and is extraordinary.
The Showroom in Qingdao
A few months before any trip, the work would begin. I would receive the trends from each retailer — their direction, their mood boards, their customer profile for the coming season — and I would brief and direct my factories accordingly. Slowly, a showroom would fill. Samples, swatches, colourways, ideas. Possibilities everywhere.
Then, a few days before the buyers arrived, I would be there with the factory — editing, refining, curating. Moving things around. Taking things out. Asking myself whether what we had built truly reflected this brand, this season, this customer. There was always a moment where I would look around the room and know it was ready.
Then the buyers would arrive, and the whirlwind would begin.
In the best seasons, working with buyers like the great teams at House of Fraser and Debenhams, they might select upwards of a hundred designs from a single trip. Those would be refined, costed, reviewed — and perhaps twenty would be ordered. At the time, that attrition felt normal, even frustrating. Looking back, I understand now how extraordinary it was. The ambition. The investment.
Gone are the days of that scale.
Getting Inside Their Heads
What I love most about this work is never purely the design. It is the people.
I have always said that my favourite thing is getting inside the heads of the buyers I work with. Understanding not just what they want, but why — what their customer looks like, what their brand stands for, what makes the retailer distinct from every other one on the high street.
Every brand requires a completely different eye. Different colours, different proportions, different moods. Shifting between them feels effortless to me — though looking back I realise that this fluency was itself a skill, built over many years of paying close attention to people and brands and what makes each one unique.
The buyers who stand out most in my memory are the ones with genuine design literacy. Those who could walk into a room, feel what was right and what wasn’t, and brief it clearly. Who understood product not just commercially but instinctively. Working with people like that was a creative partnership — we brought the best out in each other. We were working toward the same thing.
Sitting in car journeys across China. Sharing dinners after long days on factory floors. Navigating language barriers and logistical chaos together. Real relationships formed in those conditions. The kind forged by a common purpose, shared effort and mutual respect. I miss many of those people enormously.
What Was Built Over Time
When I first began working with factories in China and Vietnam, the conditions were entirely different from today. Quota restrictions. Very little English spoken. Travelling deep into the country to find the right supplier, with little infrastructure and no digital tools to smooth the path.
And yet — or perhaps because of all that difficulty — what was built in those years was something profound.
I have worked with some of the same factories and suppliers for twenty-five years. The trust between us is almost impossible to describe. They are my friends. In some ways, my family. I know how they work, what they are capable of, where they will push themselves for me and where I need to support them. They know the same about me.
This kind of relationship cannot be replicated quickly. It cannot be procured. It is the accumulation of showing up, year after year, through difficult seasons and good ones, honouring commitments and being honest when things go wrong.
For a brand trying to build something of quality and integrity, that trust is worth more than almost anything else.
The Season That Passed
Several of the retailers I worked with most deeply are gone now. Debenhams. House of Fraser. Laura Ashley. High streets that once held ambition and product knowledge and genuine buying craft have thinned out, changed beyond recognition, or disappeared entirely.
I won’t pretend this hasn’t been hard to absorb. Not just as a business reality, but as something more personal. Those retailers weren’t just clients. They were the context in which some of the best work of my career happened. And the people within them — the buyers and heads of buying and design directors who genuinely cared about product — many of them are out there now, carrying all of that knowledge and experience, wondering where to put it.
I know this because I am one of them.
Recently, I saw a role advertised at a smaller brand and immediately thought of someone — a buyer I had worked with for years, someone with exceptional instinct, design literacy and commercial understanding. Someone who would be perfect for it. And in that moment I felt, acutely, the strangeness of this season. All that talent and experience, built over decades, circling a market that increasingly seems to be looking the other way.
Budgets are tighter. Experience is expensive. And so, less experience, is sometimes chosen, because it costs less in the short term.
I understand the logic. I just think it is a mistake.
What We’re Still Carrying
Here is what I have come to understand, sitting with all of this.
The knowledge I have built over twenty-five years is not diminished by the fact that the industry has changed. If anything, it is more valuable — precisely because so much of it has been lost elsewhere.
I know how to look at a product and understand immediately whether it is right for a brand. I know how to brief a factory clearly, how to look at a sample critically, how to develop a range that is commercially coherent and creatively distinctive. I know how to travel to the other side of the world and build relationships that last decades. I know how the whole chain works — from the first pencil sketch to the finished product on a shelf — because I have been part of every link in it.
And I know I am not alone in carrying this.
There are many of us — designers, buyers, suppliers, creative directors — who find ourselves in a quieter chapter, wondering how to bring what we know into a world that seems to have forgotten why it matters.
I think the answer might not be where we have always looked.
A Different Kind of Client
The big retailers that once defined our careers are largely gone or diminished. But there is a different landscape emerging — smaller brands, independent businesses, new names trying to build something with integrity and not always knowing how.
These are the businesses that could benefit most from exactly what we carry. They don’t have twenty years of accumulated buying wisdom in their team. They haven’t stood on a factory floor in Vietnam or China at six in the morning trying to solve a quality problem before a shipment leaves. They don’t know what they don’t know.
But we do.
I am beginning to think about what it looks like to offer that knowledge differently — not as a supplier in the traditional sense, but as a guide. A creative and commercial partner for brands that are finding their feet and want to do it properly.
I don’t have all the answers yet. But I know the question is the right one.
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in it — the experience, the restlessness, the sense of carrying something valuable without quite knowing where to put it — I would genuinely love to hear from you.
And if you are building a brand and wondering why your product never quite looks the way you imagined it, or why your supplier relationships feel transactional rather than generative, or why the quality never matches the ambition —
Perhaps we should talk.
Twenty-five years of knowledge doesn’t disappear when the industry changes. It just needs a new place to go.