During my time as Vice President of Public Relations & Marketing for Alpha Chi Omega, I was responsible for the creation, sales, and distribution of all our chapter merchandise. Between 6 pieces, I successfully sold over $6,000 of merchandise by creating original designs that were distributed nationwide. Through these clothes, I encapsulated the style and "vibe" that Alpha Chi Omega wanted to represent, whilst also widening our target audience and make clothing that appealed to those not in Alpha Chi Omega (i.e fraternity men and non-greek affiliated friends and family).
In order to achieve this, I leveraged my technical skills, such as proficiency in Adobe Creative Cloud, in addition to soft-skills, such as maintaining strong relationships with custom apparel companies, to launch 2 collections. As a Strategic Design Fellow, my proficiency in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator truly came to life in this project. I spent countless hours tweaking ideas, exploring fonts, testing colors, and aligning shapes in order to make the perfect final design. After creating my designs, I had to maintain strong relationships with clothing manufacturers in order to bring them to life. This included another creative proof process (where my designs were sent back and forth with minor edits made by the apparel company), and constant communication to ensure that each piece would hit quota in order to undergo production.
Although fun, creating merchandise also posed many challenges. In an organization of 130+ women, it is nearly impossible to please everyone and come to an unanimous consensus when it comes to decision-making. Due to the fact that the merchandise I design may not be everyone’s style, it was difficult trying to cater to a diverse audience. I was faced with the challenge of making universally-appealing designs to those whose style is girly-girl, tom-boy, and everything in between. In order to combat this, I conducted market research before attempting to attack any design. By sending out a Google Form with questions about preferred articles of clothing, color scheme ideas, and ideal patterns / trends (e.g the like/dislike of tye-dye, butterflies, luxury-inspired), I was able to empathize with my consumers and really see the product from their point of view, rather than a designer’s point of view.
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