On my first day of placement, I was greeted by James Wells, the senior stylist, he showed me around the studio and introduced me to everyone and then showed me around some of Barbour house, where I got to see the showrooms and pick up my ID card. I spent the majority of my first day assisting with an ecomm shoot, where I helped the photographer with lighting by holding up a poly board, tidying the fitting area and hanging the clothes back on the rails and then retagging them by matching the codes off the tags and the labels in the garments. On my second day I was asked to help prep for another ecomm shoot by steaming the rail they were going to be shooting. It was really interesting being able to see an ecomm shoot happening for the first time. Over my first few days I also helped out in the stock room, where I was asked to look through a few rails and check for SS24 PRE samples without tags and then find the matching tag from a pile of them that I’d been given, once I’d retagged, I put the samples away on the correct rails. 

My second week of placement was dedicated to stock training. I learnt how to pull stock and how everything should be organised in the stock room. I helped pull around 800 SS25 Main samples. I did this by going through several rails in the stock room and through packaged pieces which hadn’t been hung up yet and searching the items SKUS in the SS25 Main Range Plan on excel which would tell me which collection they were in meaning I could hang them up on labelled rails. After I’d hung the items up on the correct rails, I would type my initials and the date in the stock pulled column. This included Barbour and B.I. (Barbour International) men’s and womenswear, which consisted of 21 collections. As well as pulling stock, I also assisted stylist Kathryn Allsopp with a couple of tasks, such as adding images of specific pieces from AW24 and William Morris CADs to a styling deck for a campaign shoot. 

I started off the following week by working on Kathryn’s hand over for a reel’s shoot, which consisted of finding the correct womenswear samples they were planning on shooting and putting them on a labelled rail and organising it into drops and looks, and then putting it all into garment bags, as the shoot was originally going to be on location but ended up being in the studio to match the men’s reels shoot. For the rest of the week, I was asked to assist Aisling Ryan a freelance stylist and Scarlett who’s another in house stylist. They were working on SS25 Main styling days, I helped them by adding images of the rack ups onto the styling decks and then finding the mannequin photos of the focus sample of each look. To find the mannequin pictures I would check on the range plan when it had been shot and then find the correct file that it had been placed in.