印花樂共同創辦人暨創意總監
inBlooom Co-founder and Creative Director
沈奕妤 Yi-Yu Shen Ama
YEARBOOK 2023
Yi-Yu Shen Ama－The Value of A Director vs Design Management
Over the course of innovating with inBlooom over several years, developing my design team
has been at the core of my leadership agenda, and is also analogous to my
personal experience of gradually moving away from being a “designer,” learning
to be a “design executive/manager,” and then ultimately to becoming a “creative
director,” leading the direction of the brand.
These three identity changes are my personal
perception of my role and my growth in three stages within the company.
Apart from the first few years when I was a
one-person designer, when the company began adding other designers, I tacked on
the role of “design director.” Not only is the person there to design, but that
person must also begin to answer questions from other designers and people regarding
the design work: Who is assigned to this case? How do we determine the
schedule? Is the design quality good? Does it fit the style of the brand? Is it
what the market or the customer wants...?
The most important task of the manager’s role is
“integration and communication,” internalizing the needs of each unit for the
“design,” thinking about how to determine the schedule and manpower
arrangements, and to ensure that the design output meets expectations. Just to
do these things is already very mind-twisting - design needs may be a myriad of
demands, they could be as small as a new partner’s business card, to a series
of promotional visuals, to something as big as a million-dollar customer design
case, or a main collection of seasonal merchandise. Each designer has his or her own progression,
expertise, and perspective... and there are also cross-departmental partners’
ideas, customer opinions, product development schedule, budget control, and the
production techniques of various items to consider.
These are already “management” level matters,
which require a completely different mindset from that of a designer. But since
the company is my own, I have to figure out what to do by myself. At the same
time, I’m still working as a designer, and my continuous design work helps me maintain
my acumen for the market and keep myself at the cutting edge of design - when a
general is not on the battlefield for a long time, their blade will become
blunt.
Moreover, my level of happiness is still
relatively higher when doing design work as compared to doing design
management. Opening up Illustrator and drawing away is simply a form of
salvation as opposed to making a schedule in Excel or calculating costs.
Stepping into the role of the design director, I
led the design team in a substantive way for quite a long time until I
consciously finished the last design series and hired a design director for the
team. From that point on, I stopped executing the design output myself and stepped
into the position of a real “creative director” for about ten years. In these
ten years, we’ve been exploring management methods and establishing design
management tools, systems, and processes from scratch, so that the succeeding
design director has rules to follow and that I can confidently transition my
role. The decision to change roles came from my understanding of the growth of
the brand. It was time for me to take a back seat and focus on the future
direction of the brand, cultivating new talent, importing resources, market
layout, and demonstrating value... to prepare for the next wave of growth
challenges.
After ten years of refinement, the overall
design look of the brand has become a self-contained entity that cannot be
easily compromised, but at this point, I have to think about “breakthroughs”
and how to allow each designer to “express his or her creativity within the
framework of the brand.” My philosophy on the leadership of the design team can
be likened to an “orderly garden in the midst of chaos,” where I roughly
arrange the garden paths, visual layers, seasonal inflorescences... Then I
allow the garden to flourish freely. Of course, weeding and fertilizing are
still needed from time to time, while keeping the artificiality at a minimum.
The garden doesn’t necessarily have to look like it has “me” written all over
it, but that sense of freedom is what I want. To maintain this appearance, it’s
necessary to continue to have discussions with the design manager and the
director based on the existing style in order to provide appropriate guidance
on the scale of creativity.
The level of difficulty for a design
breakthrough will be higher, and we must keep trying new methods and styles
together with our team. The challenge is “compatibility.” For a brand that has
been around for more than a decade, there are bound to be people who expect the
classics to stay alive, but there are also bound to be those who want to see
innovative breakthroughs. I can’t say that we’ve found the best solution, but
at the moment, we’re trying to find compatibility by launching two design paths
every year - “new classic colors” vs “all new patterns.” Once the new patterns
have been put through the annual sales test, they’ll be incorporated into the
classic design collection for future reproduction.
In order to allow designers to keep a patch of
their own garden under the framework, I created the Floriography Weekly e-newsletter project in 2022, in which one
designer will be the creator of a print design every week with a theme of their
own, and customers will receive a new print every week after they subscribe to
the weekly newsletter.
At the same time, I also need to lead my team in
identifying the noise interference. When someone says “you guys keep doing the
same thing” or “this thing doesn’t look like inBlooom,”
how do you not get lost in the noise? This is also a task for the director. The
key is to build the confidence of the whole team in our own design creativity so
that the design is not a subjective style or viewpoint presentation, but a
systematic approach that can communicate with and complement each other.
The marketing and sales team’s data research,
including communities, e-commerce sites, retail stores, distribution channels,
and B2B businesses, all possess data that can be shared with the design team,
which is the basis for our annual design decisions. The real voice of our
customers and internal partners is also important, and collecting these voices
is also an annual event for us. Every year around October, we conduct a
customer opinion survey to collect our customers’ feedback about our annual
products and activities, which are then used as reference for product
development and creative ideas for the following year. We also conduct
cross-departmental brainstorming within the company almost simultaneously, so
that all partners under the brand can contribute their ideas, and the results
of these creative discussions are then consolidated by the brand department
into design development ideas. With this foundation in place, there is no
guarantee that the best design will be produced, but it definitely has its own reference
value. Meanwhile, this also strengthens the connections between our working
partners, the customers, and the design team across the company as a whole,
cultivating in everyone the feeling of “this is the design we made together,”
which is the most important notion we want to convey.
The role of a creative director is sometimes about
threading the needle to ensure the smooth operation of these creative
mechanisms; sometimes, it’s about being a cheerleader, inspiring tired and
frustrated colleagues; occasionally, it also morphs into that of a stern devil,
urging people to undergo trials by fire...
Although this general has long left the front
line and her sword has blunted, I have gained something else from my leadership
role. The ultimate task of a creative director is to continuously lead the team
in enhancing the competitiveness and influence of the brand through creativity.
Over the top of the hill is yet another lofty
world, but fortunately I still enjoy the journey of the climb.
Photo: Production of a large quantity of fabric
using roller printing. This is the Formosan Crested Myna pattern.
Photo: Inside the inBlooom store
Photo:
A variety of original printed merchandise. The color scheme is an important
element in whether the print design is attractive
Photo: Hand-made satin print using a screening
plate.
Photo: Subscribe to the brand’s e-newsletter Floriography Weekly and download an
original print cell phone wallpaper every week!