Fashion Marketing graduate with five years of marketing and communications experience, including three years working in the apparel PLM sector as a Marketing and Pre-sales Assistant at Freeborders and several short terms projects with leading PLM companies.

I started my marketing career working for Freeborders, under the direction of Mark Harrop, whilst on placement from studying an International Fashion Marketing degree at Manchester Metropolitan University. My degree covered all aspects of the fashion industry: marketing, finance management, retail, supply chain management, product development, internationalisation strategies, quality management, clothing and fabric technology and for my Honours project I focussed on the competitive advantage retailers can gain from PLM technologies, where I conducted research to investigate market needs, potential benefits and the key differentiating factors between PLM providers.

At Freeborders, I was trained on the full suite of PLM software applications, creating online pre-sales demonstrations mapped to retail and supplier clients’ supply chain processes as well as giving user-training to UK and European agencies and partners. From a marketing perspective, presenting IT solutions to such a creative industry always created a challenge and required innovative thinking to communicate the ‘PLM message’.

Since then, I have spent over two years working in marketing and internal communications roles in other industries (insurance, bespoke furniture, construction), providing consultancy on facilitating change programmes, implementing marketing strategies to budget, creating collateral for print and web (e-newsletters and online magazines), co-ordinating events and developing websites to accessibility and readability standards. However, my passion lies within the fashion industry and the new innovative technologies being developed to meet the latest industry challenges, essentially ethical trading and climate change.