Internal Factors
HERE ARE SOME OF MY NOTES ON INTERNAL FACTORS THAT EFFECT THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF A DESIGNER:
a) Expertise
• Designers usually posses an innate ability for creative design or a sense of ‘what people want’. Designers are from quit diverse backgrounds and expertise.
• Some designer’s expertise is targeting a special group through marketing and producing the types of product for that particular market. Textiles have been used for insulation, filtration, to enhance human circulation and provide environments for cultivating plants.
• The expertise of a designer may be in fibre technology, fabric production, creating furnishings, costumes or everyday wear. The training the designers undertake is diverse as the areas of textiles.
• A designer working for a company must be aware of the responsibility of meeting consumer’s needs. Their employment would be as a result of the skills they can bring to the company.
• As the textile industry is so competitive designers need to keep on top of all innovations and technologies by reading trade journals, fashion magazines etc.
• Many fashion designers expertise reads as a signature of their creations. For example; Collette Dinnigan’s expertise is in fabric selection for simple silhouettes.
b) Facilities
• Facilities available to designers are important. The designer needs to ensure that working conditions are safe and that Workcover regulations are respected.
• With technology and computerisation making machinery more efficient to contract out manufacturing.
• Supre once had facilities to store 3 million dollars worth of fabric, six cutting tables and Eton garment production system, printing and dyeing premises and retail outlet, design rooms and administration all at their head office. When they hit financial difficulties they had to scale down their facilities. They no longer bought fabric is large quantities ahead of time, and started to use make and trim facilities.
c) Financial
• To start a business a large input of capital is needed so that the business can function whilst establishing a name for itself e.g. wages, rent, materials, manufacturing costs, marketing fees are all necessary and they may need to be paid before the business starts making profit.
• Productions costs and overheads that need to be considered include wages, superannuation, workers compensation, holiday pay, updating of equipment, training costs, multi-skilling of workers and costs of marketing.
• Often creative people aren’t good business people, so to overcome this, designers often work with a business partner. Consideration must be given to the time delay from the outlay for materials to the profit of the product. This affects the money flow. The shorter the timeline for production to sale, the better the cash flow.
• The Break even point (BEP) is the point at which the cost of development manufacture and promotion is met. No profit is made until this point is met. By spreading the cost over a large production run, the product will be priced more competitively, but f the demand is overestimated and doesn’t sell there is the additional cost of the materials and manufacture of the products that didn’t sell.
• A good understanding of the anticipate product life cycle is important in deciding the number of units produced and their respective price. A product that will be a short trend needs to be expensive as the market can tolerate to gain a return for the investment before the market collapses.
• Much of the financial factors have a close relationship to efficiencies of sale and the type of product being produced over a period of time.
HOPE THIS HELPS!!! GOOD LUCK IN YOUR EXAMS!