Rimsha Shahid

Leading the development of Women's Hard Accessories from initial drawings to SMS within strict timelines and challenging costing margin parameters. • Providing technical expertise in close collaboration with design, merchandising and production teams to ensure accurate product execution from concept to bulk. • Communicating a clear development critical path and managing vendors in Italy, Madagascar and India to ensure timely delivery of luxury-level product. • Leading frequent visits to Italian vendors to oversee development and quality execution of new season styles as senior point of contact. • Managing seasonal development budget in line with vendor capacity and collection requirements. • Negotiating costs with vendors to align with margin strategy, with clear communication of targets throughout development process. • Maintaining up-to-date data in the PLM system.

Responsible for development of Men’s Small Leather Goods, Belts and Charms across Mainline and Runway. • Building and maintaining partnerships with design, providing confident technical feedback and working collaboratively to actualise qualitative product. • Established strong vendor relationships with an understanding of capabilities to implement creative and practical solutions with a goal to achieving design vision. • Leading sample reviews and engaging cross-functionally with engineering, quality and costing teams to mitigate risks throughout development stages and taking proactive steps to resolve problem areas ahead of production. • Successfully and consistently meeting delivery of prototypes and sampling.

Supporting the Men’s Accessories team in the end-to-end development of product with focus across Leather Goods, Charms and Children’s Hard Accessories. • Creating and managing SKUs on Flex PLM, ensuring data accuracy. • Raising purchase orders, tracking and updating budget documents, creating sample order documents and tracking the timely delivery of showroom samples. • Managing shipment, tracking and archiving of prototypes, samples and swatches. • Supporting the PD and design team with fittings and show prep. • Independently launching Mainline Charms and Boy’s Hard Accessories and liaising with vendors to ensure the quality and timely delivery of styles from prototype through to sampling stage.

Supporting the Product Development Runway team in the week leading up to London Fashion Week, I worked closely with the Ladies Leather Goods team. • Creating and updating product entries on Flex PLM to provide up to date SAP codes and product specs in order to launch products for approval. • Photographing and logging samples as they were received. • Updating the LLGs line sheet using Microsoft Excel program and ad-hoc tasks around the studio leading up to the AW19 RTW show.

Worked closely with the Menswear design team to produce initial knit swatches, support garment and stitch research, artwork development and updating technical sketches with accurate fit information in the development stages of the AW18 collection.

A proactive member of a small collaborative team, working with the Studio Manager to develop an efficient critical path and ensure production deadlines were met to the highest standards. • Operating a Stoll multi-gauge machine for production of fully fashioned knitted garments. • Overseeing quality control and finishing i.e. steaming, labelling, and packaging. • Point-to-point linking of the following garment points using a 12gg and 7gg industrial linker: side seam, sleeves, collars, shoulder seams and pockets.