United Kingdom (£)
The best part of my job arrives in the post.
A sample arrives from a factory, and you suddenly hope that the weeks of design, development and decision making have paid off. Most of the time it is close, but sometimes it is a little way off what you had envisaged.
Either way, the first thing I always do is get out the measuring tape.
I am Will, and I help to look after all things clothing and product development at Baffle Haus.
Most of this job is not designing. It is a spreadsheet of measurements, a photograph with arrows drawn on it, and a comment written as clearly as I can manage for someone I have never met, working in another language, a long way from here.
The things that take the most time are often the things nobody will ever see. A woven label at the hem that moved four times before it sat where it should. Whether a jacket lining is quilted or flat. None of this will ever come up in a conversation about the garment. You will put it on and it will feel right, or it will not, and you will never quite know why.
That is the job, really. Nothing we make should give you a bad reason to notice it. I know I have done my job properly when a customer really enjoys wearing a product, and even better, someone asks them where they bought it from.
We are very lucky at Baffle. Both the Cedars and Old Post are full of kind and honest people who will tell you things straight over a coffee. The most valuable kind of feedback.
None of this is a solo effort. Everything with the Baffle stamp on it is designed in haus, and there are a lot of good people here with opinions worth listening to. My job is mostly to push a bit further than we went last time.
So that is what this is for. Not the finished shots, there are plenty of those already. The bit before that. The samples that came back wrong, the decisions that took three weeks, the reasons behind choices you would otherwise never hear about.
I will be honest about the things we get wrong too, because those are usually the more interesting ones.
If you have ever wondered why a garment costs what it costs, or why it takes the best part of a year to make a jacket properly, stick around. I will try to show my working.
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Will