Week one at LOOK!

As I've mentioned on here I've got my self a months long work experience placement at LOOK magazine in London! 

Well, it's the end of week one and there's so much to tell! 

As you can imagine I was pretty nervous at first but as soon as I got in the building and met the  other girls interning there and all the staff I got really excited! We got taught the ways of the fashion cupboard and then we were left to get to know each other.

Everyone is really lovely, which makes going to work in the morning a lot easier! 

After a couple of days of returns, call ins and general assisting the first couple of interns got asked to assist on a photo shoot which is so exciting! High St Hottest and 'Scuba' were the photo shoots for this week and seeing the stylists, Chloe and Lucie, style the clothes was really cool (it will be even cooler when I see it all in LOOK in a couple of weeks!). 

On Thursday night their was a bar on the roof terrace for all staff in the Blue Finn Building which we went along to! It was really nice to get to know the girls outside of the cupboard and have a few glasses of Pimm's after a long day at work! We planned a lot more for the week after, we thought it would be nice to grab a bite to eat and a cocktail! 

On Wednesday I helped Sam, a fashion assistant at LOOK, with 'tap to buy'. This is a feature where readers who buy LOOK on a tablet can click on products and be directed to the stores website so they can purchase the product there and then! It's a pretty long task but it was interesting to see how other areas of the magazine work and also do a bit of online shopping while working! 

I went home this weekend to catch up with friends with family which was lovely but I was extremely excited to get back to London today! Roll on week two...

Bailey's Stardust

During a recent trip to London I visited the National Portrait Gallery and saw the David Bailey exhibition: Bailey's stardust! It was so interesting and exciting to be able to see all these iconic images first hand. I got told I couldn't take photos after about 5 minutes so these are all I could get but I absolutely loved it! 

I really want to get into photography more and photographic styling so I think during my time at FIT in NYC I'll take some classes which will help improve my skills in these areas! 

Beautiful Paris!

Spending a week in Paris and visiting Disneyland was so wonderful! Getting away for a week                                                                is exactly what I needed! 

I absolutely love Paris so I was beyond excited to visit the city once more! We visited all the usual tourist spots as well as touring the more unknown areas. 

I've uploaded some of my favourite images from my holiday but I want to talk about the 3rd, 4th and 5th image. This was a perfume shop on the Champs-Élysées and their visual merchandising instantly caught my eye! It reminded me of my launch concept for my perfume brand 'Cloud Nine'. I have decided to launch White Jasmine by having pop-up stores in Selfridges as well as designing our own garden at Chelsea Flower Show! However, when we launch our own stand alone store after all these events I planned for the visual merchandising and store front to be very similar to the images I am referring to! 

We won, we won, we won!!

Ahh I can't believe all our hard work paid off and we won our section! We are all so over the moon!

The feedback we got from Chris, Tim and Karen Gilbert was all really positive as well! Some of the key feedback was our presentation skills, they all thought we were very clear and confident in our execution. They also thought the layout of the presentation was very clear and on brand, something we tried really hard to achieve and thank fully it worked! They also thought our research and use of stats was of an extremely high quality and really backed up all our points. 

The only negative they had was towards our advertisement and Tim suggested possibly editing it by making it more sleep focussed. However, we found this part the most difficult as we wanted to avoid using cliche's so we had to find another way to represent sleep.

Cloud Nine's final ad campaign!

These are our final advertisements! We decided on a 16 second long video which focussed on the key elements in the fragrance such as jasmine and the bed sheet which links back to sleep. We wanted to keep it short and not use a model as we wanted  to steer clear of the stereotypical sleep product campaigns where a sleeping woman in bed is extremely common. We also chose to use subtle colours for this reason as the use of dark purple or blue is now heavily associated with the 'cheap' sleep aid products.  

We made the photo advertisement and the video very similar in style! We used all of the same items in both as we wanted them to represent sleep in the same way. The bed sheet represents sleep, the jasmine shows the key ingredient within the fragrance and the music we layed over the video shows the key qualities of Cloud Nine: purity, transparency and well being.