My diploma project aimed at developing ethnic wear collections for All, Pantaloons and Big Bazaar. The project offered me a first hand experience of the professional world and gave me an insight into the professional and commercial side of design education.

This project required studying international market trends, relating them to the Indian context and applying them to make feasible and marketable collections. The project also included the market study, trends forecasting, sales data, interaction with category clients, and the customers prior to designing and sampling.

I focused mainly on matching crafts with style and affordability. The retailing was to be done from Pantaloons’ stand-alone stores as well as retail chains. The collections had simple styling and cuts while patterns were created by placement of various surface ornamentation techniques. The design principles and guidelines included economy of fabric consumption, utilisation of unit available, combining types of fabric according to wearable aspects and cost. i.e. expensive fabric to be combined with lesser expensive fabric to regulate cost between fabric and embellishment cost, offering variety in collection in maximum colour, embroidery styles and silhouettes. I also had to keep in mind ease of production, availability of bulk fabric for production, and cost effective garments.

To sum up, all the efforts resulted in collections that were contemporary, cost effective and saleable. The freedom and the responsibilities that were vested on me helped me a lot in executing the project.