This was yesterday..its a different story today

12-07-2010 Monday
It was the first day of work in Creative Bee. I reached the studio, completely exhausted, battling my way through the thick traffic of Hyderabad. Added to that, I am a complete stranger to the roads. Every street looked similar, every turn gave a feeling that I was going through the place over and over again. I was lost in the roads of Hyderabad and it took me an extra 45 minutes to figure out the correct road, even if I have been to the studio once before.
After I reached the place, I had a discussion with Mrs. Bina Rao about some of the queries that I had.
Here I have listed down the main points discussed.
- The collection will be a one time product since it will be made out of end bits of cloth.
- The age group that Creative Bee caters to is between 30 to 50 years. But I can make a collection for the younger generation (20 to 30 years).
- She had advised me to get acquainted to the standard measurements of the garments.
- She would like to see the sketches of the garments soon.
- She briefed me a little about the archival work. It seemed to be great lot of work.
- As of now, I won’t be given a stipend.
Later I took a look at the end bits of fabric. There are a wide variety of fabric in terms of material, weave, print and color.
The dominant materials used for fabric are:
Cotton, cotton silk, raw silk, filature silk, uppada silk, tussar silk, chiffon.
Different types of weaves are used to create textures and then printed with natural dyes.
Kalamkari is used for a major section of the products.
Some observations (referring to the IDEO research methods – A fly on the wall)
- Few customers came in. There were 3 in fact. None of them bought anything, mainly because of the price.
- People were not aware why the price range was high. One of them didn’t understand why using everything natural made products expensive.
- The older generation (around 50) preferred mainly whites and lighter tones. They looked for textured fabric and cotton. They preferred lighter material yet not transparent.
- The younger generation (20 to 25 years) preferred deeper colors like maroon, dark blue with gold khari prints. But they were skeptical about the longevity of the gold prints. They liked transparent, light weight material.