INITIAL THOUGHTS - HUNTER

On Monday 4th of March we were set our new brief, a textile collaboration, my group's chosen company is 'Hunter', the well-known rubber boots brand. Our aim is to design an interior/outdoor product or design as if the fashion brand is asking us to create a new collection for an interior product rather than a fashion piece. The group's first idea was to go for a festival and camping theme, creating designs for products such as tents, camping furniture, lighting etc, however once we had done some research we found that this was very limited in terms of products of what we could actually design for. Therefore, we decided to go for the theme of an outdoor space, creating designs for cushions, blankets, furniture, lighting, picnic accessories, rugs, plant pots etc, we found that there were more options for this particular theme.

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As there are five members of our group, four preferring printing and the other preferring knit, we had to find a broad theme in which we could create a series of designs that would work with both knit and print and potentially bringing these two techniques together. Looking at knitted stools, knitted blankets and textures for products we found some interesting initial ideas for a garden/outdoor area. A difficulty we will find is that Hunter as a brand is aimed for higher-class people as they're quite expensive and have been seen being worn by well-known/famous people. In order to keep this quality of the designs, we need to make sure it's not too extreme and crazy, but more simplistic yet classy. Our main theme is going to be based on the 'outdoors' creating drawings of plants, botanical design, floral and also more simplistic things like abstract and shape design, merging these together but also creating prints with these alone.

I feel like we've started off well, we have done some research into the brand, the options of what we're designing for (outdoor space) and the theme in which we're designing. We have also chosen a colour scheme from WGSN, a S/S 20 colour scheme called : 'empowering', these colours are bold, vibrant and bright, although these aren't the exact colours Hunter uses, our group wants to make the typical British outdoor experience less dull (due to weather being rainy etc) and more bright and positive, making the experience much more enjoyable no matter the weather. We want to look into more things like water proof and water resistant materials, even creating a space within shelter outdoors.