Designing & Product Development

Garment designing is an ideal blend of good research on fashion trends & creativity to execute them for the target customer. It is a long phase with lot of brain storming,  prototyping, interviews and many iterations, which generally would start more than a year before the final product comes to the market. We would love to share with you our first design process here with you. 

Idea

Our idea of clothing at Smitten Organic was to create something with some basic features we found important like -

• ultra soft
• playful designs
• something that 'grows' as the baby grows
• convenient, specially for the new parents it should be easy to change even in the middle of the night
• made with organic cotton
• manufacturing process with with respect to the people who make it

Concept

Before actually starting with sketches and samples, we needed to to work out the inspiration for the collection we wanted to develop. As this was our first collection, it took us extra long to work out the details like convenience, usability, quality, functionality, values and experience. 

We did a lot of trends research, personal interviews and visualization of ideas on pin-up boards based on which we crystallized a collection that we could shape up further. With this we worked out the list of styles we wanted to pursue and the features we must have. 

Also we did a few brain storm sessions to work out the colors we wanted to use for our first collection.

Transformation of concept

With these concepts in place, we started with the transformation of concept to a tangible garment. This itself is also a long phase,  where the designers prepare sketches for the garments and the artwork and getting the fabric ¹ samples for colors and the artworks. Based on these we worked further together with our suppliers to get the full sample set. All those delicate print and the handwork were made together with the artisans with lots of care and love. Every piece of art in clothing- whether it is a button, a hang-tag or the main label, was made with a personal touch. Finally the first champagne moment came when our first samples arrived. These were really beautiful to make us smitten.

With these samples in hand we started two activities - validating the technical details and quality and the concept testing phase. We visited a lot of retailers and prospect customers - mothers or mothers-to-be. The purpose was to gather their feedback on the colors, prints, styling and above all on why they would or should use organic clothing. These interviews helped us a lot in improving our garments and proposition. We're now looking forward to getting the final product in stores and in different webshops including our own.