The School of Fashion and Textiles offers a whole host of opportunities for students to collaborate with some of the biggest brands around. BA (Hons) Fashion Branding and Communication student, Carina Coelho, tells us about working on a live brief with Lounge Underwear.
Carina Coelho
BA (Hons) Fashion Branding and Communication Student
Posted 19 February 2021
We kicked off our second year with Lounge’s Chief Brand Officer, Melanie Marsden, and Head of People, Georgia Perry, who gave us an insight into Lounge and set us our brief: to create a campaign to mark International Women’s day 2021, which empowers and embraces their ‘Female Family’ across the world.
Georgia commented, “It’s a campaign very close to our heart. Our thoughts were with COVID-19 disrupting our usual day to day ability to get the girls together and bring each other up, it was crucial to create a campaign to highlight the importance of women supporting women, not just here in the UK but all around the globe! We wanted to encourage our followers to connect as a community.”
Live Industry Experience
The project was such a great way to experience a real role within the industry. We could choose to be a Brand Manager, Creative Director, Content Editor or PR Manager. We had to utilise online meetings and collaborative research in order to successfully pitch our ideas and visual content. Every aspect of the concept had to be justified in order to show innovation and increase brand engagement, especially as Lounge are digitally based!
The Pitch
Selected groups were given the chance to present to Lounge, and they all showcased such thoughtful and in-depth responses to the brief. The visuals were so strong in every team, with topics ranging from fertility awareness to lockdown loneliness; there was truly a sense of community during each team’s presentation.
Erin Lewis from the winning team, #BetterTogether, said: “We loved working as a group for this project, we all boosted each other’s ideas and it was a real insight into the industry. Our campaign was inspired by Lounge’s concept of the female family. We felt that in the current climate it was so important to focus on keeping a community feel and this sparked our idea of connecting virtually with our friends to keep morale high via a girl’s night in, and helping young people cope with loneliness.”
My Role
I acted as a Content Editor in my team, which included creating brand content, product focused content and the content strategy. I had to consider how we would communicate our message Lounge’s marketing channels. I loved this brief as it had so much room for creative freedom, and I thoroughly enjoyed putting together editorial and blog content to fulfil our concept’s intention of bringing women closer together digitally. My future goal is to one day create content for a publication and this experience was so valuable in furthering my skills and professional practice.
Incredible experience
Working with such a prominent and successful lingerie brand gave us an insight into a real role within a team environment. The module allowed us to test innovative methods of creating content and putting visuals together, and every team produced something they can be proud of.
Georgia Perry, Lounge’s Head of People spoke about how much they enjoyed the project: “It was lovely to listen to everyone's different ideas and reasons behind their campaigns, and to see how our brand is perceived by the students. It felt so heart-warming to see all the positive campaigns created on the back of this. Our aim is to remind our community to embrace everything that makes them unique and I think all students did this really well. I’ve loved gaining a close partnership with the lecturers and students at BCU, that’s really special for us as a Birmingham brand.”
Course Director Claire Ritchie said “Our fashion industry live collaborations are a vital part of the experience that we provide for students on the course. The opportunity to collaborate with Lounge on such a socially engaged and creative brief has been invaluable. The work produced by the students has been excellent and we are really proud to show off all of the fantastic creative talent that we have on the programme."
