Dieneke from Hidden Art and Patsy Francis from UBS introduce the Forum
Thanks to everyone who came along to the 2011 Forum, which this year focused on the best ways for designers and designer-makers to increase their sales, a topic close to everyone’s hearts.
We’d also like to thank UBS (and particularly Patsy Francis) for their kindness in providing a venue and refreshments.
It was a full-day session with 12 speakers, so there was a lot of information to process! Along the way we found out why curating 60 designers is like herding cats, how much John Lewis charge for making payments on-time, why you should raise your prices for difficult clients, and what height to place your products at if you want them to sell (eye-level, if you’re wondering).
It’s always nice to be able to get out and meet fellow designers and designer-makers, as it can be quite a solitary profession with a lot of time in the studio, and we think our annual Forum provides a great opportunity for our members to network. We’re working on a full summary of the day which will be up on our website, but it’s hard to encapsulate the huge amount of information and tips that we heard over the 8 hours.
You can see some of the presentations from the day on our Slideshare account.
The full list of speakers was:
Product designer Lina Meier (http://www.linameier.com/) on her experience of selling her work to John Lewis.
Jane Carr on the selling exhibition she curated for Fortnum and Masons and how to get noticed by curators
Ian Rudge (Business Development Manager http://www.clarionevents.com/) on about the art of exhibiting
Kal Chottai (DamDesign http://www.damdesign.it/) on online user experience
Snowden Flood (www.snowdenflood.com/) on using new media to increase sales
Simon Cronshaw discussing the successful Culture Label website (http://www.culturelabel.com/)
Charlotte Sale (http://www.charlottesaleglass.com/) on pitching to Liberty as part of the Britain’s Best Next Thing programme.
Christoph Geppert of Grain (http://www.graincreative.com/) on branding and selling
Julianne Lavery, visual merchandising lecture at the University of Westminster on visual merchandising techniques
Plus Micro Sessions from:
Jo Sealy (http://www.to-market.co.uk/), Better Marketing
Patricia van den Akker (http://www.akker.co.uk/) , Pricing
Max Fraser (http://twitter.com/maxfraserdesign), Trends
Hidden Art Members watch Jo Sealy talk about marketing and it’s importance to designers
[…] forecast, preferring the integrity of a more personal perspective’ – sounds a lot like Max Fraser’s talk at our 2011 Forum. As he said then, trends can do more harm than good to design, and making products because you […]