Example 1: LCF X Flying Tiger

Working with a Programme Director at the Fashion Business School and a representative from the Business and Innovation team at LCF (both of whom I will keep anonymous) I was able to research more about the LCF collaboration with Flying Tiger the brand. The project was a live brief developed for BA Fashion Buying and Merchandising Year 2 as part of their Retail Concept Development and Product Management unit. The students were asked within their group to provide a robust business case for a new range for the brand Flying Tiger through developing a business development report and supporting visual material.

The winning group impressed the team from Flying Tiger so much that they were asked to assign (transfer the IP in their work) to Flying Tiger for a fee to see their work produced and sold in stores. Each student was paid £500 for the IP of the 5 outfit designs and accompanying accessory designs. After looking through the high level of design and development involved in the project and understanding exactly what Flying Tiger was able to access after the IP assignment I was extremely surprised to see that the students were only paid a small sum of money.

Figure 1: The banner image from Flying Tiger’s website introducing the collaboration with LCF (text translated by Google Chrome browser)

The staff team involved in the project were able to tell me more about what they believe the students to have gained from the project alongside the money which included team work development, industry ready skills such as business report and mock up designs as well as receiving excellent industry feedback to help develop their project further. You can read more about the Flying Tiger project within the raw data collected from Participants 3 and 4.

Figure 2: Some examples of the students dress up outfit designs from the LCF X Flying Tiger collaboration available at flyingtiger.com.

Example 2: NJAS X Chatty Feet

NJAS stands for Not Just a Shop. NJAS is based at HH campus and sells artwork, fashion and gifts designed and created by UAL students and graduates. I have created this short case study based on an email conversation that I had with 2 members of UAL Careers and Employability about their experience in creating a new collaboration for students with the sock brand Chatty Feet. Due to the amount of confidential information including names, contact details and discussion of exact fees I was not given permission to reproduce the email chain for the purpose of illustrating the content for my PgCert.

The staff members told me more about the initial conversations that they had with the brand about organising a collaboration for students to win the chance to design a pair of socks that would be sold on the Chatty Feet website and with their physical stockists. The brand was quite transparent and explained how much they would usually pay for the design which involved assignment of the designers IP. This assignment meant that the creator couldn’t use the design for anything else such as their own products or a collaboration with a different company and there was no time line attached such as a limited edition sock.

I was pleased that the staff members reached out to me because they were concerned that the agreement they were discussing didn’t seem fair to the students. One of the staff members said ‘If the design is good enough it’s irrelevant that they’re students so I’m not okay with the logic to pay them less, I don’t want to under-value their work!‘. It was great to hear them being able to see the value of the students work. I think that it’s really important that we teach students about value and how to ensure that they are valued as creators and their work is valued fairly by others both at UAL and in industry. If we treat them as ‘just students’ and undervalue their work due to their student status then we are not preparing them effectively for industry.

There is lots of extant literature that focuses on the skills that students develop from working on live brief such as Rochon (2022) and Gundala, Singh and Cochran (2018). However, I feel there is a key gap in this which relates to understanding your value as a creative within your respective industry and how this informs your later practice. There are lots of mentions of things such as developing team work, listening skills, collaboration ability and ensuring students are learning skills they need for industry but crucially this is missing a discussion about fees and negotiation of these fees.

Figure 3: An image from the Chatty Feet website showing some of the socks that they sell.

Reference list:

  • Gundala, R. R., Singh, M. and Cochran, T. K. (2018) ‘Perceptions of Integrated Experiential Learning of Graduate Marketing Students’, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(2), pp. 74–89. 
  • Rochon, R. (2022) Live brief projects in higher education: a contexualised examination and staff perceptions of experiential learning. Doctoral thesis, Buckinghamshire New University. Available at: https://bucks.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/18506/ (Accessed on 3rd January 2022).