Key skills need to be nurtured in both traditional and emerging techniques and technologies
A Return to Key Skills
This 4,100 square metre area encapsulates a state of the art mass-production facility for national designers and retailers and will also contain a variety of workshops, factories and areas of distribution and storage.
FashionCapital
We have teamed up with FashionCapital, a one-stop support service for all areas of the clothing and fashion industry. Established in 2001, FashionCapital provides a wealth of experience to its online users while giving a unique insight into the wonderful world of fashion.
Jenny Holloway of FashionCapital talking about how manufacturing can regenerate the fashion industry
The right time for UK Manufacturing
Jenny Holloway argues that the lack of skills in the UK is where the biggest gap lies in the whole of the fashion industry is. Jenny states that ‘back in the 70’s and 80’s there was a trend towards narrow and deep where you have a narrow product line but you have deep penetration into buys. Consequently the time was right then to go abroad, you have massive economies and scale but actually what happened as a result was that we lost our skill base in the UK.’ Here at the UK Fashion Hub nurturing core skills is at the heart of our proposal. We want a return to grassroots training and mentoring as this will help people acquire necessary skills for jobs and in turn this generates an array of employment opportunities. Another aim of ours is to bring manufacturing back to the UK and a base for this will be housed within the Hub itself. Uniting the fashion and manufacturing industry. The design and manufacturing industries link together a variety of different bodies that essentially generate a world of fashion.
Nurturing Future Manufacturers
The incubator and enterprise units give students a chance to be mentored by experts from a specific field and to be given advice from an industry professional. A carefully managed mentoring programme ensures stability and growth for emerging designers and manufacturers.
‘We understand what it takes to deliver sustainable business growth for the London Fashion Designer sector. We know how to work with creative people, how to develop survival strategies for innovative businesses and provide confidence, not only to the designers themselves, but also to buyers, the finance community, manufacturers and the wider fashion industry.’
Wendy Malem, Director, CFE (Centre for Fashion Enterprise)