Top Ten Things I learnt on my Placement with Lorna Syson!

1. Running a business. Lorna has been creating interior products for 7 years and it has been fascinating learning how she started and how she is still progressing. It takes a lot of late nights and working over the weekends either for shows or catching up on the accounts.
2. Packing orders. Each product needs to reach the customer beautifully packaged and undamaged. I enjoyed looking at her designs everyday, which helped with the longer packing days!
3. Learning how to adapt a brand based on your customers. I started to learn about Google Analytics and what Lorna’s customers were also looking at was really interesting in order for me to angle the blog posts at them and entice similar customers to look at the shop part of the website.
4. Customer Service. Talking on the phone, replying to emails and dealing with customer orders. I came into this placement with some experience but it was interesting learning how to talk to a different type of customer.
5. It may seem like an obvious one but keeping the studio tidy makes the daily running so much easier and makes packing orders a lot simpler. Safe to say we learnt the hard way when we lost the fabric scissors!
6. Photoshoot Styling. This was one of my favourite experiences of my whole placement. Spending two days helping with the building, styling and photographing of Lorna’s new collection has opened up a new field I hadn’t given much thought to previously.
7. Lorna produces her work on the computer through Illustrator and Photoshop, I was intrigued to see how she draws on the computer to create all of her designs.
8. Lorna is very keen to get ideas from her interns, from choosing the sampling of fabrics to how to make the studio easier for us to design tweeks.
9. I was involved in the Open Studios, Grow London and Clerkenwell Design Week. I talked to various people including potential public customers, trade customers, architects, press, blog writers, students and show representatives.
10. Jenkins, surprising how keeping him calm improves the atmosphere of the whole studio. I’m going to miss that little man!

Want to know more? Read Eleanor’s full article about her time with us here

Contact us on lorna@lornasyson.co.uk if you are interested in working with us!