FINAL YEAR: FINAL MAJOR PROJECT

My time at Forever Unique began tinged with sadness as it meant packing up and leaving London to move back to my family home. I was sad because this had never been the plan; I'd always envisioned spending my entire placement year in London, doing a variety of different placements. I'd never imagined the possibility that I'd find a paid, full-time position in a really interesting role with a 12 month contract in the North, where placement opportunities are undoubtedly much more limited. Nevertheless I was really anticipating getting stuck into this role; my expectations were high and the interview process had left me feeling extremely positive about the workplace.

My day-to-day schedule was always busy - often frantically so - and I was never stuck waiting for something to do. There was also a lot of responsibility in the tasks I was assigned, to the extent that in actual fact, I no longer felt that I was being 'assigned' tasks as I quickly adapted and immersed myself fully into the team. My independence has evolved dramatically as I gained the confidence to intuitively make decisions in my role, such as designing social content without a brief or alter aspects of the website. While learning skills in website management had never strictly been a part of my job description, I have really valued the time that I have been able to dedicate to enhancing the website and the customer's consumer journey. In order to enhance the customer's experience using the Forever Unique transactional website, I focused on improving the selection of imagery using for product listings and trawled through back-dated product to correct errors. I'm pleased that I can add experience in CMS to my CV as I have always got the impression that this is an extremely desired asset to have among interns and it has certainly broadened my opportunities as a result. In addition, I was always pleased to see my purpose-designed graphics used daily on the Forever Unique brand's Instagram and Snapchat story platforms. When I began this placement I had never designed a gif animation before, and while this side of my role was also never strictly included in my job description, it was the area which I spent most of my time working on.

With the introduction of a Head of Digital, considered to be the leading manager on my retail team, much more emphasis was concentrated on driving sales, beating targets and increasing conversion rates. I'm satisfied that the time I took labouring over the website and social media channels must have played a role in increasing the average conversion rate by tracking a more improved journey from start to finish through the customer's exposure and experience of the brand.

Unfortunately, it was a repeating pattern within the business that my team were generally fulfilling tasks which were not technically part of their official role. This left me torn; as an intern, I should be flexible and willing to lend my hand to any additional role, but I couldn't help but feel like myself and others were often being taken advantage of. Of course I wholeheartedly expect that in this industry companies won't hesitate to under-pay and over-work an intern beyond their means, but it was a very worrying realisation to recognise that the entire team were being subjected to the same treatment. My team were hard-working and resilient with a lot of expertise to utilise, but sadly the failings of the entire management team meant that their strengths were not recognised. The general morale across my team was incredibly low and our managers remained extremely ignorant to it. To this day I still remain quite angry at the atrocious statement that the Sales Directing Manager fed to me during my interview, where he claimed that there was a very low turnover of staff at the business. I now know this to be extremely false - in my six months there I watched closer to a dozen staff members leave, some of their own accord and others forced out for cost-cutting reasons regardless of the length of time they had spent as loyal employees to the company. These instances were very uncomfortable to witness, and while I do understand that the fashion industry - or any industry, for that matter - can be 'cut-throat' and vicious at times, the manner that these dismissals was carried out was totally unprofessional and quite frankly, just not good enough. No provisions were ever made for the absence of dismissed team members, and no plans were put in place to hire a new replacement on a lower wage. Communication about such matters was anything but transparent - this completed alienated us all from the management team and made us extremely distrustful of them. It was regular talk between the team about 'who would be next' to get kicked out. The rest of our retail team were simply expected to pick up the pieces and continue as normal, sharing out our lost team members' responsibilities between us. Perhaps it's outrageous and unprofessional for me to say, but I can't help but feel that the people running this business are not fit to be doing so.

Towards the end I was very reluctant to adapt to such disruptions, having already been stretched to my limit. I'm cautious not to overstep the mark with my criticisms - I know I'm just an intern - but I still think I have the capacity and experience to recognise when a business is not caring for it's staff well. The work culture at Forever Unique was appalling. The team members were this company's greatest asset and in retrospect, it seems horrendously ironic that in an attempt to improve the customer's experience, our working experience suffered as a result. While we cared about each other on the retail team, our assurances and time to vent frustration was hushed and silenced due to the tense working environment. As a result, I often felt alone. With such a massive weight of responsibility on my shoulders, I often found it hard to socialise during working hours, and given the fact I was living at home and commuting into Manchester city centre, socialising out of working hours on those rare occasions was also difficult. In my next placement, I hope to feel much more at ease in a strong and supportive environment. While it wasn't a hugely important factor to me at the beginning of my placement year, I've discovered that feeling happy where I work is really important to me and it will be something that I ask questions about when I reach the interview stage of new potential internship opportunities.

Ultimately, it was the low morale within the company, the lack of respect from management and the changes made to my role were enough to make me hand in my notice despite having agreed to a twelve month contract. I no longer felt that I was learning anything new - the skills which had been coming thick and fast in the first several months had become stagnant, and my day-to-day role was starting to feel repetitive. Perhaps the lack of new variation would not have been enough to make me want to leave, if only I had felt appreciated for the work I was doing.

I am partially frustrated that my summary of this placement has been so negative in retrospect. While I have a lot of criticisms to offer, I don't regret the experience or feel like I have been badly affected by it. In actual fact, I feel like I have massively benefitted from the amount of responsibility I took on during these six months and in a sense, I know that it has advanced my experience beyond that of my peers. Being thrown in at the deep end really does have its advantages.

The experience I've gained in styling has been a particular highlight. I was pretty against the idea of ever wanting to pursue styling as a career prior to beginning placement year but now that I have gained so much exposure of the process behind styling campaign and commercial e-commerce photoshoots on such a regular basis, I am much more open to the idea of directing shoots as a career path. I really have developed my understanding of the photoshoot process from start to finish, by creating initial moodboards, researching concepts, booking hair & make-up artists, photographers and models and preparing props, sets and garments before finally carrying out the shoot to reach the final imagery which I have then selected carefully for the editing process to begin. After being edited, it was my role to upload these images to the website using my aforementioned newly acquired CMS skills. This really does capture the way that I have experienced the cycle of e-commerce. I've also been quite shocked to reflect on how advanced my skills in Photoshop have become; creating daily content for social media has done wonders for my knowledge in digital design and I am just itching to put all of the brand new techniques I have learnt into practice in final year.

Final year still feels very faraway and I am admittedly very happy about that. I've enjoyed the first half of placement year so much - even with all of the bumps in the road along the way - and I'm suddenly very happy about what the next six months will have in store for me, now that my placement at Forever Unique has come to an end prematurely. I'm excited to get stuck into something new and deeply want to pursue something in magazine publishing, hoping to further the initial experience I gained at Fabulous magazine.

I was approached by the Sales team to lead the design of an advertisement for an upcoming issue of Seventeen magazine's US Prom addition. I was so excited to get stuck into this task, since Seventeen is such a worldwide respected magazine!

I saw this task through from start to end. I put in the initial research by looking at past advertisements and the general voice of Seventeen mag and then designed mock-up drafts for approval by higher management. The Sales team drafted up prom dress options which they are anticipating to be popular, hero pieces of the season and I selected complimentary combinations which would be visually effective. It seemed appropriate to select a number of different garments for the one advertisement as this gives the consumer a number of options, rather than alienating them if one dress isn't to their taste. To ensure that the advertisement looked professional and up-to-date with Forever Unique since its rebrand, it became clear that we would need to shoot imagery specifically for the task's use. I was responsible for preparing the garments and studio ready to shoot and dressing the model, then liaising with the Head of Creative to select and edit the final images before constructing the final outcome.

This task relied heavily on communicating with higher management who had secured our space for an advert in the magazine. This was often challenging at times as the communication was often one-sided; I had been left out of e-mails which would have been beneficial for me to be CC'd into so I was often unaware of criteria and important information. One last minute addition to the advertisement which had been arranged and agreed upon without my knowledge by management was the inclusion of a Snapchat QR code which would take readers directly to the Forever Unique website to shop instantly. This is a really interesting example of digital/social realms merging with print press - especially at a time when print press often appears to be declining into extinction, what with the closure of several women's print magazines in recent weeks.

I can't wait to get my hands on this copy of Seventeen Prom so that I can add it to my small but ever-growing collection of magazine contributions!