C&A
C&A
From May 2014 to June 2015
C&A is a 170 years old brand founded in 1841. Is present in 24 countries around Europe, Latin America and Asia and stand among the biggest retailers in the world.
C&A was my first multinational company and where I had the opportunity to grow immensely as a professional, reporting directly to a fashion coordinator and to a brand manager, there I found my passion for brand management.
I created in collaboration with the brand manager the whole strategy for our licensing line of t-shirts, which in 2015 was one of the biggest bets for C&A Brazil male division.
The mixed up between pop culture and classical characters was a huge success.
The result was outstanding, we had a front table in the men´s department that had to be completely changed every three weeks, and it was filled with twelve different t-shirts which time, totaling around 80k pieces per entrance.
Part of my job as the designer was leading the whole team of graphic designers and to brief then on all of the prints.
I approved then all with the fashion coordinator and then upload all of then for the licencor approval, which required the knowledge of all the limitations regarding the characters and how far they could be redesigned.
Which puts me up with daily contact to some licencors such as Disney, Warner and Nicklodeon.
For more designs go to : https://www.behance.net/gallery/28686481/T-shirt-Desgin-for-C-A-Brazil
I was responsible for the line of shirts as well, and differently of the t-shirts that had an 100% national production, our shirts were being made across Brazil, China and India.
A daily follow up was required with C&A offices in China and India for doubts resolution, CAD´s approval and supervision on samples and trims.
The main challenge in this line was to modernize the classical denim shirt which used to be in the classical male department, and under my supervision came up to the youth department.
As I have experience and training in laundry technics I was the right call to this challenge.
First I opened the brand horizons regarding fabrics and brought new ones, than my laundry expertise, to create some edgy effects, and finally some hints of prints, sometimes adding color and sometimes corroding the print in the fabric.
For more designs go to : https://www.behance.net/gallery/28686783/Shirt-Design-For-C-A-Brazil
C&A is also known by it´s special collections, here in Brazil we already had huge names of the industry such as Stella McCartney, Roberto Cavalli and Calvin Klein among others.
The main focus of this collection are the democratization of fashion and the injection of hypeness to the C&A brand.
For the first special collection exclusively for the youth mens department I offered myself as the leading designer, and to my surprise I was appointed.
In this special collection I didn´t design the cloths itself, but along the designer of the brand, in these case Reserva.
We came up with a mix that would serve then and the concept they wanted to bring to a mass market as C&A, and a commercial, viable and more important, oriented to our client, that would serve C&A´s.
The collection had a full mix of products from underwear, to bottoms, t-shirts, shirts, sweaters, jackets, denim, shoes and accessories.
My main job as the leader designer was to assign to all my other colleagues the prototypes they would be developing along with C&A suppliers. I held weekly meetings to up date the sampling production, and took to myself the developments of t-shirts, polos and shirts.
As part of the development process of the collection I traveled to London, China and India in order to meet up with suppliers clarify all the doubts and help the brand manager in the negotiation process, without damaging the Reserva´s designer original idea.
I traveled sometimes to Peru, where all the t-shirts and polos were being produced and needed extra attention. And the final result payed off, the collection was a success.
It was a great vote of confidence of my fashion manager and I received great feedback from our department manager, which accompanied me and the brand manager on the trip.
This experience was great and the whole team was very helpful through the entire process, which pushed me a little more towards the management side of fashion.
