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You're Murky, Not Difficult
NEWSLETTER
10/1/20262 min read
Custom clothing is such a new experience for most people that I work with. When I kick off the deep dive call with a client, more often than not they apologize for not knowing clearly what they want in the garment. They’re worried about being difficult and assume that not being able to visualize their future garment makes them exactly that - difficult.
Most clothing shopping does work this way; it’s on the shopper’s shoulders to figure out what they want to buy, find the right store, find the right style, find the right size. You choose from what is available on the rack, even if it’s not ideal.
Custom moves in the other direction; figure out what you’re looking for and have it created. But it can be really hard to physically picture a garment you can’t see, especially when you’ve been trained to pick only from the options available on the rack. There is one thought that almost always is clear though: how you want to feel.
In deep dive calls, this is where I start. What are the feeling words that describe how you want to feel in your garment? What are some inspiration characters that emote the vibe you’re after in this piece? We don’t start here because it’s easy, but because it’s often the most known and helpful in pointing us in the right direction.
As we move through the call, we cover physical elements, past experiences, concerns and must haves. By the time we wrap up the pre-design collection period, I’ve asked over 50 questions about the design. Sometimes the answer to my question is “I don’t know” or “I don’t care”. Do those answers bother me? Nope, they’re helpful.
Clients worry about not providing the right information, but the murkiness of the process is part of how it becomes productive. I’m not weighting everything on one answer or looking for something specific. The collection process is more like a pointillism painting. Each question alone is an individual dot that means very little, but together a clear vision forms for me. You, as the client, deliver the data and I, as the designer, process and decode it.
I once had a client who told me “I might be difficult, I like everything and I don’t really know what my style is”. And she did like pretty much everything. But she liked different pieces for different reasons. She could still explain her thinking. She still had thoughts on what practical needs she wanted the garment to fill. And like anyone else, each answer created a dot and over time created a clear picture. When she saw her design she told me “I don’t know how you did it. It’s exactly me. I could never have described it, but I love it”.
If you’re sitting with murky design thoughts, or have before and worry you “made it difficult”, know that your murky mud is my platter of paint to work with. If it feels murky, you're doing it right.
