Diggin' Design | An Interview with Heather Moore from Skinny laMinx
I’m always interested in what it is that makes people change direction in their lives or careers. From the outside change can seem quite sudden & perhaps drastic for some. For others it may be more of a progressive transformation.
About this time last year I knew I needed to do something with my “career” as a commercial textile designer for a large retailer. Having always had a stable, full time job it was a difficult decision but I quit my day job & took my husband & young son off to Cape Town, South Africa. It seemed like a good time to visit the city of my birth again as Cape Town was the World Design Capital for 2014.
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Image courtesy http://www.designspaceafrica.com/world-design-capital-2014/
Not having much of a clue what to expect I decided to throw myself into attending & participating in as many seminars & creative events as I could. At the very first talk I attended called The Design Dialogues V5.0 “What I Learned The Hard Way” I was delighted to find Heather Moore the designer/owner at Skinny laMinx was one of the inspired speakers that evening.
Nervously I approached her after the talk … Heather was lovely & so kind as to allow me to spend a day helping out at her beautiful studio & little shop in Bree St, Cape Town. I was thrilled to be able to handle a rainbow of fabric prints inspired by the simple & everyday & be submersed in such a warm & welcoming environment that is Skinny laMinx.
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During my short time at the shop/studio, I found there was such a wonderful sense of connection not only with the designs & the products (that are all sewn by hand on the premises) but also the Skinny community ... that not only includes customers & other businesses on eclectic Bree St but importantly the whole Skinny laMinx team. Truly an inspiring creative business!
So how did Heather go from a potential career in teaching, to textbook illustration, to blogging, to designing textiles & running a creative business? She took some time out this weekend (at a hugely busy time in her calendar) to tell me more about her fascinating transformation & the newly released range called “Diggi Dot”.
How did you come to design & designing textiles in particular? Were you always creative?
I studied English and Drama at university, and then trained as a high school teacher. When I moved to Cape Town after my studies, I had vague notions of helping run a puppet theatre, but not much more of a plan than that. I fell into illustration work while doing my postgrad teacher training, when I did illustrations for a textbook one of my lecturers was writing. The publishers liked my drawings, and started commissioning more and I ended up being an illustrator for 10 years.
What made you decide to start selling your designs ie. start the business?
After 10 years of illustration, I needed a change, so in 2006 I took a half-day job as a comic’s scriptwriter, and spent the rest of my day messing around in my studio on Long Street. I started blogging about my work, and opened an online shop on Etsy. People around the world started reading my blog and buying my things, and I got some wholesale orders to the USA, and suddenly I found that I was a designer with a design business.
Being a self employed designer can seem idyllic from the outside. What’s the hardest part of your job?
I think you'll find that everyone who started a business based on their creative output finds it incredibly hard to find time to be creative. The business side of things – the constant email stream, request for info, staff management, finances – takes a huge amount of time. Luckily these days I have a great team to share the load and I do find more studio time.
Because it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day running of a business, and stuck on the email treadmill, I try to put aside Fridays as my day for doing non-work-related creative work, where I can simply make whatever takes my fancy. I find that the things I make in non-directed time like this are often put away for a bit, and then brought out later and built upon, when the time is right.
Below : The smiley team at Skinny laMinx
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What inspires your aesthetic?
My inspiration comes from ordinary, everyday things like cactuses, teacups, staircases and vibracrete walls. I usually have a notebook with me, where I make sketches, and I take a lot of photographs of textures, details, juxtapositions and compositions that seem to give me ideas. Follow me on Instagram at @skinnylaminx to find out what I’ve been looking at lately.
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What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever had to do?
I'm not terribly brave at all, but I am good at tricking myself into doing things that might scare me by breaking them down into little steps, which is really how I ended up starting a business, exporting all over the world and opening a shop too. Isn't there a saying about eating an elephant one bite at a time?
Tell us about the exciting new Skinny La Minx range, just released on Friday? Where can Aussie shoppers browse & buy from the new range?
Diggi Dot is our new fabric collection, and it comes out of the trip I was invited to take to India last year, where I taught block printing on a Ritchie Ace Camp. My experiments with using lino blocks to create pattern was not one I'd used in my designs before, and I really loved the way that so many patterns could be generated from different combinations of a single block.
Shop online at shop.skinnylaminx.com
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See more from the Diggi Dot range at skinnylaminx.com & read more about how Heather's teaching trip to Jaipur inspired her new range at http://skinnylaminx.com/2015/05/29/diggi-dot/
Thanks so much to Heather for her generosity of time & spirit in working with me on this blog post at a time when so much is going on at Skinny laMinx.
* Images courtesy of Skinny laMinx
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