Melissa Theobald

Name

Melissa Theobald

Course

Fashion & Lifestyle Promotion, MA

Contact

About

Originally, I completed a degree in Business and Marketing as I felt I would be good in Business; this quickly changed, and I fell in love with Marketing. I loved the idea of collaborating with people you wouldn’t usually cross paths with and felt this would be an interesting concept to play with to see what unusual partnerships could arise. As an employee of DFS’s Sustainability team, I have lots of knowledge in this area. I also believe that collaborative efforts are required to make the changes the planet requires. As an artist, I originally struggled with breaking habits. In the Business School, everything is very structured and extremely strict in terms of layouts, fonts and images so it was difficult to snap out of this and put my creative hat back on. I love colour and believe the more colour, the better which fit well with this project. I have grown so much on this MA course, going from somebody who only ever used PowerPoint and Word to being confident on Illustrator. Working full time whilst doing the course was a slight challenge but I feel it helped me grow as an individual, allowing me to become more organised and gain better time management skills. I am confident that if I was to move into a new role, I would easily be able to adapt to the brand and create further campaigns.

Project overview

Boden & DFS

My project concept was to take textile waste from one industry to create new products in another. As an employee of DFS who works within the sustainability team, I understand the scale of textiles currently being sent to landfill. Although the business does their best to ensure minimal fabric waste by using technology which cuts the fabric in a way which leaves the smallest amount possible, there is still many textiles being diverted to landfill as the business currently has no use for them as they are too small to use for their own products. Internally there has been some discussions regarding potentially using the fabric to create buttons and other accents which gave me the idea of using these scraps to create clothing. I decided to use Boden as the fashion brand DFS would collaborate with due to them holding similar brand values and heritage. My project is a capsule collection containing ten pieces which can be worn together or as standalone pieces. The whole collection is made from sofa scraps with hopes of reducing textile waste in the upholstery manufacturing industry and inspiring other businesses to create similar concepts to help reduce the number of textiles going to landfill.

UCLan Degree Show artwork submission by Melissa Theobald named Boden & DFS
UCLan Degree Show artwork submission by Melissa Theobald named Boden & DFS
UCLan Degree Show artwork submission by Melissa Theobald named Boden & DFS
UCLan Degree Show artwork submission by Melissa Theobald named Boden & DFS
UCLan Degree Show artwork submission by Melissa Theobald named Boden & DFS
UCLan Degree Show artwork submission by Melissa Theobald named Boden & DFS