Shelley Leaton: in Seal Beach, CA

SMU designer for the FOX Lifestyle department, designing monthly and seasonal men's, women's, and youth t-shirt graphic packages in apparel, and headwear for retail groups and international partners that include: Buckle, Pacsun, Macy's, Lids, Winners CAN. Working with sales, development, tech, and merchandising to deliver brand correct, successful styles and completing tech packs. Designing headwear for mainline Fox, including colorways and tech packs. Knowledge of headwear fabrications and trim embellishments. Reviewing and update styles through sample process till line adoption.

Freelance designer for a variety of brands in long and short term positions. Categories include: Young Men's Outerwear and Knits, Premium Denim, Jrs Footwear. Skill sets used are color trend research, color ways, cad work, custom textile and graphics separations for printing, and embroidery. Tracking and maintaining domestic sample flow.

• Responsible for all levels of Women, Jr's, Girls woven, tees, and accessory designs. • Building a women's business from 200K to 5Million USD in 5 years and managing a creative team of 5, along with showroom management and daily operations. • Creating complete design packages that include: overseas sourcing of fabrications/trims, cus-tom fabrications, technical Cads, graphics, and label/branding packaging. • Checklists of PPS/TOP sample stages, to ensure all details of design are as originally ap-proved/requested. Final QC checks before product is distributed to customers. • R & D Forecasting color, design and style trends, and embellishment techniques. • Translating custom graphics into all levels of embellishments: embroidery, appliqués, stones, printing, flocking, custom wash developments. • Maintaining brand price points and margins with dynamic trend based designs based on suc-cess of previous top selling styles. • Sourcing overseas partners to produce product, with constant supplier communications to max-imize successful design ratios, production, and timely deliveries. • Travel to Europe, Hong Kong and China for international trade shows to conduct trend re-search, sourcing new suppliers, and strengthen communication/relationships with current sup-pliers. Main goals are to facilitate fair pricing and expedite sampling times for faster “speed to market”.

• Design and production of in-store marketing, POP, trade-show, and special event designs. Also including branded materials for seasonal catalogs, sales line lists, Ads, hang tags, textile repeats, and screen art, and branded logos. • Building solid communications with art/marketing depts., and outside vendors to ensure time-lines are met. • Creating complete design packages that include: technical Cads, graphics, and label/branding packaging.

Worked with the Fraud Prevention Director to create original visuals to launch internal and public security programs.

• Assisted in the design of swim and sportswear, worked closely with Design Director, produc-tion, pattern-makers, supporting in fit meetings, and textile vendors to create new and dynamic designs. • Responsible for creating file systems for seasonal Cad artwork files. • Design placements and textile repeats for various production techniques. Adding trims and embellishments as needed. • Creating original cads, sales line lists, hang tags, and product books of produced swimwear.