The colors chosen for your apparel line can help to evoke an emotional connection between you and your target consumers. Color has the power to awaken feelings in people that help them to express who they are or how they’re feeling on any given day. As someone who has a closet dominated by black, grey and navy blue garments, I do feel like a brighter person on the days when I pull out my sherbet orange top or my bright red blouse. Color has the ability to change a mood for better or worse, and it’s important to think about these aspects when creating a color palette for your line. First, let’s start with a core color palette. There should be a handful of colors that you plan to have in your apparel line every season, every year. I’m talking about your brand’s version of neutrals or your specific brand colors. Black, white, a specific grey that you prefer and a specific blue that you prefer are extremely typical of a core color palette throughout the industry. However, if you’re an outdoor focused company, you might find that deep browns, tans, ivory and a specific green color are better for your brand. Those more natural and earthy colors will say more about your company’s connection to the outdoors, and that’s an important message to send. If you’re making running apparel, a reflective silver might need to be a core color for safety purposes, or similarly for hunting gear, you might need to include fluorescent orange. Once you choose the colors that define your brand, keep them in your palette and build around them for each future season of design. Adding seasonal colors to your core palette can depend on many factors, so it will be important to remember your company’s core values when designing your color guides. For example, is your company led by annual trends? If so, then you may want to include the same ‘colors of the year’ that other brands will be looking to develop. However, there is no real rhyme or reason to color beyond your brand’s core palette, so this can and should be creative, fun and inspiring. I like to find images that create a feeling about the upcoming season that I want to portray to customers. It helps me to build a story and a “why” behind the apparel designs that I can then use in marketing campaigns and social media posts. I think the authors of The Secret Language of Color, Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut really said it so well in their introduction: “Anyone who claims to be an expert on color is a liar. A true expert would have to be fluent in physics, chemistry, astronomy, optics, neuroscience, geology, botany, zoology, human biology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, art history, and cartography; and the list goes on and on.” It is not possible to predict all the ways that color will have an effect on your brand, your customer, your sales or your success. All you can do is create a color palette that speaks to you and conveys the feeling that you want to put out into the world with your apparel line. If you do want to do more research on color theory and how color creates responses in humans, I recommend these additional resources: Colors: The Story of Dyes and Pigments by Bernard Guineau, Color & Human Response by Faber Birren, and Color Psychology by Richard G. Lewis. Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, may earn me a small commission.

This is my first weekly post about the progress of my Travel Apparel Line development! I am so excited to be sharing the details of this project with you all, and I hope to create excitement and anticipation for the launch. If you’re interested in receiving regular updates about the line, please sign up for my weekly newsletter, which will share my progress every Wednesday. To give you a little background on what I'm working on, my idea is to create an ideal "travel uniform" for women. I will eventually also build out a similar line for men, but I am starting with a very small budget. This does mean that I need to be very discerning about my initial target customer, and I believe that women will be faster to embrace the collection. I want to create a capsule of apparel that people will consistently grab from their closet and wear when they're heading to the airport, to wear on the plane. The garments will be soft, comfortable and flattering. I also find that dressing up and looking professional at the airport can result in better service and sometimes even upgrades! So the line will also be designed around the idea that you don’t have to be uncomfortable to look buttoned up. The idea of this line is based on my extensive travel experience throughout my career, and is built around what I now always wear when I travel by air. The eventual line will have a baselayer legging and fitted tee, a dress pant, a traditional button-down shirt and a wrap sweater. At this point, I'm doing fabric research on the first four pieces. I will most likely push the sweater to a later launch. Bags, socks, accessories and additional garments will be considered once we gain some momentum. So far, I’ve completed my initial line plan and put together my budget. I’ve reached out to two fabric mills that I’m hoping to work with on the collection, and I’ve spoken to a production manufacturer in Los Angeles that feels like a match made in heaven for my line. Swatches and header cards of fabric options are on the way from both mills as we speak, and I can’t wait to get my hands on them. Once fabrics are chosen, I will be able to start visualizing the garment designs better, and will start to make some prototypes. That is when the real fun begins, so stay tuned! There is so much more to come throughout this year…

Putting together a mood board for your designs will help you to pull together the color palette, early fabric options and inspiration for your garments all in one place. It is something that you can easily create and post up on a wall so that it’s an easy reminder of your ultimate goals. Whenever you feel yourself starting to stray away from your original idea, you can come back to your board to find a renewed sense of direction. During my tenure at the University of Cincinnati at DAAP, we created our mood boards by tearing images out of magazines and folding or cutting them to fit on a foam core board. Flipping through the pages of fashion magazines, I would tear out anything that invoked the same feeling my designs created for me. Once I had a stack of magazine tears, I would then go back through them to choose ones that not only created a gut reaction from me, but also made sense for my project. For my Senior Thesis, my bedroom had mood board posters hanging all over the walls. That way, when I was sewing my projects, the images and colors surrounded me. Today, it is maybe easier to create a mood board digitally. Pulling images and placing them on an Adobe Illustrator artboard might be faster and more comprehensive than relying only on a stack of magazines. But I still like the practice of browsing the glossy pages with my own fingers, allowing the images on each page to speak to me or fade away as I turn over each leaf. Once I have inspiration images chosen, I then like to go fabric shopping, requesting swatches at the store. Most fabric stores will allow you to swatch anything you need, and will cut a small square from the bolt for you. Those small swatches get pinned all around the board, bringing texture, more color and fabric ideas to your design. Pin up buttons that you like, as well as trims, zippers and ribbon. Seeing all of the elements of your garment in one location will help you to see if they truly look good together, or if the vision in your mind needs to shift a bit. Doing this before you start sewing and buying large quantities of trims and fabric is key. Without this process, you could lose weeks working on a garment that doesn’t look good in real life. For example, in a professional setting, this step can be (sadly) overlooked. With a line plan as long as the product manager’s arm and limited time for the designers to come up with ideas, a true mood board process can be the first deliverable cut from a company’s timeline. However, for the few times I have seen this implemented at work, it was a crucial advantage to the development process. I often see first prototypes rejected for various reasons, but one of them is that the details of a garment aren’t coming together properly. The aesthetic in person isn’t matching the designer’s image in their mind, and the garment either gets dropped or completely redesigned. If color, trims, fabric swatches and details had all been evaluated for each garment ahead of time, these time consuming delays could have been avoided. Sometimes, this can mean months of additional time added to your project, which could mean missing your launch date or on-time delivery to your consumer completely. If you are working on your own line, I highly recommend taking the time to create your own mood board. The vision of it hanging physically in your space will keep you motivated and inspired. If you created your mood board digitally, print it out and pin it to a bulletin board for the same effect. Its process of searching for exciting images, fabric ideas and colors is not only one of the most fun parts of the design process, but it can also give you a huge advantage in understanding how your final design will truly come to life.

Trend forecasting services could help to round out and finalize your research phase of development. I like to use them to help with final style and color decisions on an apparel line. Some designers consider this step to be essential to their work, while others prefer to go with their gut on these final details. It really all depends on whether or not you have a need to follow trends in your niche and the kind of garments you’re creating. The first way you’ve likely already picked up on a lot of the upcoming fashion trends was when you were doing your Competitor Research. Scouring magazines and other brands for key details likely also gave you a picture of what’s currently popular in the apparel industry. Did you see cropped t-shirts over and over again during that research phase? Maybe you saw so many items that were the same shade of purple, and now that color is imprinted on your mind. These were more cues on what is trending right now in the industry, and they can help you to understand what to incorporate into your own brand. Be careful if only using these methods in your trend research though. If you’re following what other brands in your space are doing now, and you launch one to two years from now, you’re going to be late to the party. WGSN is the future forecasting service I’m most familiar with from my past jobs: https://www.wgsn.com/en. Many corporate apparel companies will purchase a business subscription that their employees can log into to research color trends, product trends, style trends and so many more features. I always liked to use WGSN to help with color palette building and as a source for all the latest fashion runway shows. An understanding of what couture and high fashion brands are designing today will give you a very clear picture of what retail and ready-to-wear brands will be doing in the next year to two years. It all has a wonderful trickle-down effect. There are many more forecasting services available besides WGSN as well. It would be worthwhile to investigate and explore the options for the services that best suit your needs. I find that completing any fashion trend forecasting is really going the extra mile. Researching your target consumer and market competitors are the two crucial stages for building a product line. Following color or style trends can be layered on top of these essential pillars, but may not always be necessary. As your business grows and you add more pieces to your line, you may want to consider adding this step at that point. For example, selling Black Tech Tees as your first key item probably won’t require you to understand the latest fashion trends. But knowing which color is the best option to add to next year’s collection might come in handy when you can afford to add a second colorway of your Tech Tee. The best part about Fashion Trend Forecasting is that, once you go through this research phase (or decide to skip it), then you start to get into designing. Next week, we’ll start looking at sketching and eventually move into technical sketches. With all of the solid research you’ve done by now, you know what you can afford to make, who you’re making it for, and who you’ll be competing against out in the market. You are ready to start bringing your idea to life!

Throughout the apparel industry, each company is focused on a specific group or ideal person to design and develop for. Some brands do this incredibly well, while others fall short. I’ve been an employee at both types of these companies, and the ones who have a very clear picture of their target consumer are the ones that succeed faster and with more ease. If you have your customers’ specific needs in mind at all times, then it becomes easier to know what they like, what they want to wear, how they want to wear it, and how they want to shop for it. Here are the top categories I like to define in a customer profile: Age, Gender, Location, Mindset, Education, Career, Annual Salary, Hobbies, Size Range, and Issues to Solve. None of these is more important than all the others! So feel free to tackle your favorites or the easiest categories first. 1. Age: What is the age range of your ideal customer? A 20-year-old consumer purchases apparel differently than a 50-year-old consumer, so it’s important to know who you’re looking to serve best. SIDE NOTE: Nobody ever said that your customers will only ever come from your target age range. There are plenty of 20-year-olds who want to dress like your target 50-year-old customer, and vice versa. This definition shouldn’t limit your sales or true customer base. It’s just going to keep your focus on a specific kind of person for your development purposes. Do you want to make kids’ clothes? If so, that opens up many more areas of research and responsibility for your brand. Make sure you know those details up front. 2. Gender: Are you making clothes only for women, and woman-shaped customers? If you’re making men’s and women’s apparel, do you want there to be parity across both lines, or are you going to put more focus on one over the other? 3. Location: Where does your ideal customer live? Is it hot and sunny or cold and rainy? Do they live in a big city or in a rural area? Do you expect your customers to wear your garments in a specific location, no matter where they live? Maybe you make swimwear, so you need to better understand the location they will use your apparel most, not necessarily where they live or work. 4. Mindset: Is your ideal customer an adventure seeker? Do they love the outdoors and camping or do they prefer the comfort of a luxury hotel? Are they crazy about staying in touch with high fashion, or do they wear the same t-shirts that they bought five years ago? 5. Education: Does your target customer have a college degree, their doctorate or a specific certification? Maybe you’re looking to make the perfect mechanics’ coveralls, so your ideal consumer went to a specific trade school. This category could be one of the lowest contributing factors to your customer profile or the most important! 6. Career: What kind of work does your ideal customer do? Like the Education category, if you’re honing in on a specific solution for a work problem, this could be a crucial area to define. 7. Annual Salary: Education and Career definitions will help you to figure out a typical annual salary of your ideal customer. This one is key to understanding the price range for your apparel line. Someone making $65,000 per year is going to spend differently on their clothes than someone making $1,000,000 per year. 8. Hobbies: What does your customer like to do with their free time? Do they golf or are they a marathon runner? How do those different activities create different profiles for your customer? Consider how that can help you create small but key details in your apparel line. 9. Size Range: What size is your perfect fit model? There is a huge need for more inclusive sizing in the apparel industry. Is there an underserved range that you can help to focus on? Are you going to open up a wide size range for your garments, or keep your size range narrow to start out? 10. Issues to Solve: Looking through the lens of all the other categories mentioned above, what kind of product issues do they face in the current apparel market today? What is the solution that you can offer to them? Define your product line from their point of view to gain a better understanding of your brand’s potential. The last step that I really like to do when defining my customer is to give them a name. I believe it really helps to clarify your image of the ideal customer. For example, when I think of my friend “Lisa,” I immediately invoke all the details about her that I would want to know if I were making her the perfect outfit. What are her favorite colors, how much can she spend on a new top, would she want her shirt to fit a little tighter or a little looser, and many more details. It also allows me to keep the team around me focused by asking the simple question, “Would Lisa like this?” or “What decision would Lisa want us to make here?” It takes all ego and questioning out of any conversation or difficult decision. It becomes less about you, your team members or anybody else’s opinion but Lisa’s. Defining your customer is essential to knowing how to focus your product line. Put a good deal of thought into their profile, do your research, talk to people and take some surveys. This up front work will provide you with a solid foundation and clear plans for the future of your business for years to come.

A project that holds a truly special place in my heart is the Leather Moto Jacket I helped to develop for Abercrombie & Fitch’s women’s line in 2010. In my senior thesis at DAAP, I researched sustainable ways to use leather in my collection, and I learned a great deal about the difficulty of sewing and handling leather for apparel. So when I was presented with the opportunity to work with leather at my first job, I couldn’t wait to learn how professionals did it. On top of that, this Leather Jacket afforded me my very first opportunity to travel for work, which is something I’ve enjoyed ever since. At the factory in Istanbul, we had the opportunity to watch every single piece of our sample garment be cut by hand. They used intricate tools that not only kept the leather from stretching during cutting, but also helped to skive the seam allowances for easier sewing. Skiving is a process of shaving off a layer or two of the unfinished side of the leather. It makes the leather thinner, which ultimately makes it much easier to move through a sewing machine. After suffering through so many broken needles and investments into special leather sewing needles at school, this would have been so key to figure out for my project! The treating and dying of leather is another special process that was fascinating to see and learn about. And since this was my first vendor visit, gaining an understanding of how trims, fabrics and packaging were organized became another new experience. Once you start to see these practices in person and meet your overseas partners in person, so much more comes together about process and product. If you know how the sewing machines are set up to create a specific assembly line of each jacket, you can better understand why a design might not be easy to sew. I’ve seen many times where a seemingly simple construction detail caused a vendor to have to transport each garment from one building to another, just to execute a specific finishing detail. It’s those small understandings that make someone a better partner, developer and designer. Travelling to Istanbul also gifted me the opportunity to see the amazing city, experience its food, culture, architecture and art. I flew home with Turkish Delights and souvenirs stuffed into my luggage, as if I’d never get the chance to travel across the ocean ever again! I was also so lucky to be travelling with a friend, mentor and amazing manager. We had so much fun together, and our hosts made sure we had a memorable experience. One of those Leather Jackets still hangs in my closet today and I still wear it often. Its design is classic and simple, while being one of the best fitting jackets that I own (if I do say so myself). It makes me feel like a cool kid, while also reminding me how far I’ve come in my career. It feels like it will be one of those pieces that remains in my closet forever, always getting a little softer and a little more worn in. Hopefully it will one day be a reminder to those I leave behind of some of the amazing adventures I had in my lifetime.

Your line plan is all put together. You have a budget. You’ve completed research on your competitors, current trends and your target customer. At this stage, you can probably imagine what your ideal product will look like, feel like and how it will fit on the body. But can you pull that vision out of your head and put it down on paper? Croquis ideation sketching is meant to be a fast way of iterating on your idea, using a template to sketch out differing silhouettes, details, finishings and textures. The trick to croquis ideations is coming up with a style that you feel represents you, your brand and that you’re comfortable using over and over again. The best resources that I know of to hone in on your croquis style are: 9 Heads by Nancy Riegelman and Fashion Sketchbook by Bina Abling. I started by studying these books in school and eventually applied their principles to create my own style of croquis. Some of the basics of croquis drawing that both books focus on: Using a balance or axis line will help to make your croquis look like they’re in graceful movement or standing on solid ground. Without using a proper balance line, your models will look like they’re going to tip over, which draws the eye away from the focal point: the garments. Fashion proportions are taller than an anatomically correct sketch. So if someone was trained in the fine arts and knows how to properly draw the human body, they’ll want to take a look at how fashion sketching adds length and perspective in a different way. This is rooted in the fashion industry’s long standing use of tall, thin models in runway shows. As the industry shifts and changes to be more inclusive, we could find croquis sketches changing, too. You can start your learning in the foundations of these sketching practices, but revise them to be true to what you believe is right for your apparel line. Even though fashion proportions are unique, it is super important to maintain those proportions for all of your sketches, all of the time. This allows you to represent the correct length, shape and measurements of your garment without even having to think about it. Without constant proportions in your drawings, it will be impossible for you, your team and your manufacturers to interpret what you want out of the real garments. Some have spent years in the classroom, practicing croquis sketching skills in various mediums. Graphite, markers, watercolor paints and specialty art pens are just a few that are focused on. I had an amazing drawing professor who could free-hand sketch his croquis on a giant whiteboard using dry-erase markers! He was super talented though, and I’ve never known anybody who could sketch as beautifully as him. Talent or tremendous practice can help you create a unique look of your own, but I’ll let you in on a secret… you can also just use an existing croquis as your template to get started. If you were to purchase one of the above books, you could even use the forms inside as your template to start. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Once a croquis is where you want it to be, it’s a typical practice out in the real world to save it as a template, and use it over and over again. Just trace them or sketch over them in your preferred medium. After all, the focus should be on the garments you’re sketching, not the croquis themselves. And once you start sketching, you can play with seam placements, proportions, leg widths, hem heights, you name it! Sketching over and over again will also remind you of the details you consistently draw on every form, which will tell you that those features are key to your design. It is not uncommon in an academic setting to iterate at least 300 different croquis sketches for submission to the professors before starting any sewing. Forcing yourself to think about that many designs, ideas and changes to your initial thought really opens the doors for better options. It allows you to picture your idea in different ways, allowing you to think outside the box. From here, you can start adding color with markers or paints, and pinning up your favorite sketches next to magazine tears that inspired you to choose that drawing. Now you’ve got the beginnings of a unique, personalized inspiration board. This board is going to be your beacon to come back to as you’re creating technical details and fitting prototypes throughout the rest of your process. We’ll talk more about vision and inspiration boards next week. Until then, happy sketching! Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are my own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, may earn me a small commission.

I was once told that I would never become a pattern maker. I was told it was a dying art that would fade away from existence, and there was no chance I could make a career out of it. Since that advice was coming from a retired pattern making legend in the apparel industry, I immediately felt two very strong emotions: Disappointment. Pattern making and fit engineering were career goals that I’d had since I learned that they existed as professions in the first place. Defiance. The pattern making industry might be fading out as it existed right then, but a new evolution of digital and 3D pattern making was just beginning. I was someday going to be a leader in that newer, bigger and better industry! It was soon after this encounter that I was given the opportunity to lead a “Denim Re-do” project for Fossil’s Apparel line in 2011. I was still very young in my career and had not had the chance to develop any patterns from scratch as a professional. This would be my first. Tradition told me that draping and drafting a brand new pattern from scratch was the “proper” approach to take. That was how I developed all of my patterns in school when I had nothing else to start from. And the pattern work I’d done so far in my career all started from a robust “block” system. (We’ll talk more about block patterns someday soon…) Instead of going down this familiar path though, my small team and I decided to figure out how to take bits and pieces of all our favorite fitting jeans on the market. So we started with a giant shopping spree, trying on every brand of denim we could find. We looked at different leg cuts, hip fits, stretch options and pocket configurations. After weeks of research and wear testing, we ended up with two clear winners for our favorite pairs, both from Diesel. (They clearly had an amazing denim fit team at the time!) So we bought as many pairs as we could afford on our company sample budget, along with a few other pairs that won for best bootcut leg shape, best straight leg shape and best pocket positions. First, we measured, photographed and noted everything about the jeans that we loved. The Diesel fit at the waist and hip were superior to anything else we’d tried on, and the rise shape was seriously on point. They were clearly doing some magic with their darting and seaming techniques, and our goal was to come as close as possible to their fit while eliminating all of their excess seams. We wanted our denim line to look simple and classic, so we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. In the initial pattern making process, we unpicked and traced out the garments on muslin. From there, we got to work transferring to paper and manipulating the pieces to come together into as few pattern pieces as possible. The back yoke was the hardest part. So much shaping had been put into their seaming techniques to give their denim the fit that we all loved so much. It basically pre-curved the entire back garment so that the wearer’s butt wouldn’t look flattened or lengthened at all. Getting this curve right without all of the same darts and seams was extremely difficult, but we were super happy with the result when we launched our new line. At Fossil, each of the products were named with a person’s name: “The Lucy Dress,” “The Bridgette Romper,” “The Claire Jacket,” etc. So when it came time to name our denim line, we were inspired by the fabric itself. With just enough spandex to help make the pants feel comfortable but not so much that it took away from the vintage, almost-rigid denim look, the fabric we chose was actually called, “Emma.” And so “The Emma Jean” was born. I’ve owned my pair since 2012 and they are still going strong an entire decade later. They’re the only pair of jeans I’ve owned that are almost a decade old but don’t have any holes or frays. The fit is now practically molded to my own specific shape, but that is one of the amazing things about your favorite pair of jeans. Over time, they become more “yours” than anything else in your wardrobe. The pattern making techniques that we implemented on The Emma Jeans were such a huge learning tool for me. I’ve taken that experience with me to every job I’ve had since, implementing new ways of thinking about blocks, pattern engineering, pattern revisions and fittings. Over time, I’ve come to realize that the methods we were using at Fossil weren’t really that unique… The apparel industry has been innovating and improving upon top products for decades. It just wasn’t something I’d experienced in that way yet! Meeting and coming together with other open-minded pattern makers and fit engineers throughout the last several years has been so refreshing. There are quite a lot of us figuring out new ways to make apparel work better and fit more comfortably. I’m happy to say that the pattern making profession is certainly not dead or dying… it’s evolving.

Back in 2004, I spent six months living in Brooklyn while working as a graphic design intern for an apparel company in New York City. Our apartment was tiny, and four of us shared a one-bedroom by setting one bed up in the closet, while the other three of us crammed air mattresses into the single bedroom. There was nowhere to walk around the mattresses, as we filled the remaining bedroom space with rolling racks that served as both dressers and closets. My roommates were all older than me, and I ended up spending a lot of time on my own, with just the city noise around me for company. I learned so much about myself while living there, especially how to be comfortable with a bit of loneliness, while being surrounded by thousands of people. The ways that I learned to be independent and courageous during my time there are still a huge part of my life today. Because of this, New York will always feel like home in so many ways. As my internship came to an end in December of 2004, it was the first time I saw the city bring its Christmas spirit to life. I worked close to the Macy’s building on 34th Street, so it became a daily lunchtime tradition to explore the window decorations and shop for Christmas gifts to take home to my family. It’s so cliché to say, but New York at Christmas-time truly is magical. The decorations and twinkling lights all over the city fill you with true happiness. It was a time of year that filled my heart with joy and hope, and it made me want to bring everyone I love to see it in person. I took my husband to see all the magic of New York at Christmas the first weekend in December, 2015, and it was everything I remembered it to be. We stayed at the Cassa Times Square boutique hotel, which was a short walk away from Broadway and so many great tourist attractions. Drinks and dinner at The Monkey Bar one night, followed by an outstanding meal at Beauty & Essex the next evening were genuine highlights. After our short visit to the city together, we were heading up to the West Point Academy, where our very good friends lived at the time. With their two young boys looking forward to seeing us for the holidays, we of course had to make sure we picked up gifts for them! We spent hours at the Lego Store at Rockefeller Center choosing just the right kits for them. And a short walk to the Magnolia Bakery after that adventure was the highlight of my day. Definitely a throw-back memory to my days living there in school. The first time we grabbed a slice of pizza was on the way back to the hotel, super late at night. We’d already eaten too much at dinner, but couldn’t resist the scent of a New York pie, calling to us. Now, I know there is a forever-long debate going on about New York vs. Chicago pizza, and I am 100% a New York pizza girl. That night, my husband became a New York pizza lover, too. Something about the unique dough and sauce that seems to be universal throughout the city, but nowhere else, is just so memorable. We spent a day in Brooklyn, where I showed off my old Williamsburg stomping grounds. Wandering around, trying to find some of my favorite food spots, we came across some new breweries, and ended up doing a little brewpub tour on our own. Keg & Lantern in Greenpoint was a serious favorite, and it looks like we weren’t the only ones who thought so. They seem to be booming and growing even more so now! With New York always having such a stronghold on my heart, it has been difficult to be away again for so long. I look forward to getting back there sometime soon, even if it’s not for Christmas.

Weddings are magical, but can also be exhausting. I’ve had the honor of being in several weddings (over a decade ago now), and my favorite is still my little sister’s big day. The problem is: I don’t really remember all of it… the day was such a whirlwind of emotion, busyness and people. She had the big traditional wedding that little girls dream of: cathedral church, slim lace gown with a ten-foot train, full wedding party with photographers and a reception that included the chicken dance, toasts, a dance with our dad and even a garter throw. I remember being nervous for my speech, bawling my eyes out when my dad walked her down the aisle and that’s honestly about it. Everything else is a blur that was luckily captured in pictures from the entire day. My sister and I are peas in a pod and were attached at the hip when we were in college together. If you’d have told us that our weddings would have been so different from each others’ at that time, I wouldn’t have believed you. But we were both engaged around the same time, and planned weddings around the same time in 2009. The difference is that I made plans to escape to paradise with a small, close group of family instead. Destination Wedding planning can be just as complicated (or even MORE complicated) as you want to make it. Putting together an event that is thousands of miles away could become extremely difficult, and I can see how it would be a daunting task for any couple planning a wedding. But I’ll let you in on my secret: it can also be the easiest way to plan a wedding, and that is what we did for our big day.  Most All-Inclusive resorts have a wedding department. Either one amazing person or a team of people are on hand to help you with every part of your wedding day, and it’s all bundled up into one price. So you essentially get a wedding planner, photographer, venue, food, flowers and ceremony as a package. We chose to travel to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for our wedding and followed it up with a week-long honeymoon at the same resort. In the months leading up to our trip, I emailed and called our wedding planner as often as I felt I needed to, to arrange all of the details of our event. She was always excited to hear from me, and was so easy to work with. When it came to choosing my bouquet, she sent me ten or so pictures of options, and I chose the one I liked best. Forget being bombarded with the choice of every flower on the planet to use in your bouquet! Which of these ten designs suits you best? Easy. Because we saved so much money on the wedding planning, photographer, venue and food (All Inclusive Resorts bundle all food into your per-night price, so dinner, dessert, drinks and service cost NO extra money), we decided to use the rest of our wedding budget to fly our closest family members down for the long weekend. My husband’s brother and his girlfriend, my sister and her husband, his parents and my parents were invited. That’s it. At the end of the day, everything for the wedding (including my dress and his outfit), two weeks at the resort to claim residency and then honeymoon, plus flights for ten people and three nights at the resort for our eight family members came out to cost us less than $15,000 total. There was no stress. I walked on the sand with bare feet to be given away by my father, and our ceremony took place right in front of the ocean. We migrated to one of the on-site restaurants after the wedding, where we all ordered exactly what we wanted and followed it up with cutting our cake at the table. Being at such a beautiful resort with the beach as our backdrop, the photos basically took themselves. I’ve heard people talk about their weddings and have a list of things they would do differently. I can honestly say that, if I were to get married again, I wouldn’t change a single detail. Everything was perfect, nobody had to worry about anything other than showing up on time, and I was so relaxed that I actually remember the entire day. If anybody is looking to get married with beauty and just pure happiness in their heart, then I really recommend looking into an All-Inclusive Destination Wedding. I’m so glad that we did.

Hello, and welcome to my website and Travel Blog page! My name is Rachel, and I could not be more excited to start my journey into the amazing, wide world of Travel Writing. I have been a “Travel Love-Bug” since I was a little girl, counting down the days and hours until my parents would pack us all up in the car or (even better!) take us to the airport for a flight to a new destination. Growing up in the Midwest, I quickly fell in love with any trip that involved a beach, sunshine and palm trees. It has become a lifelong pursuit of mine to see and explore as many beach towns, islands and ocean views as I can. As an adult, I have had the sincere pleasure to travel quite a bit for my work, seeing parts of the world through the lens of my career. It has taken me to places like Shanghai, Istanbul, San Salvador, Hong Kong, Bali and Hanoi. It has given me a thirst for knowledge about the world and a huge desire to see as much of it as I can. It is my mission to put more stamps in my passport and get back to travelling in 2022, after a couple of years’ hiatus due to the pandemic. Throughout my many years of travelling, I’ve had the opportunity to develop a “go-to” routine, outfit and packing method that helps me to keep my adventures simple to plan and execute. I’ve tried so many variations of what to wear on a 14-hour flight or how to pack the smallest carry-on bag possible, and I have a few tips and tricks that I can share by now. And as an Apparel Designer / Developer by trade, I’m going to be working to create some items that I believe will become favorites of so many travelers in the years to come. Starting today, my goal is to be doing weekly posts to share my past travel experiences, my progress on the apparel line, and stay up to date with any current or future travel plans. I look forward to connecting with other like-minded people in this amazing space! I am already inspired by some of the most beautiful photography and exciting stories I’ve ever seen, just by searching for other Travel Bloggers and Writers online. It is a dream come true for me to be joining this community.

As requested by popular demand, I am going to start featuring a piece of my portfolio every Friday. There are so many amazing projects I've had the chance to work on throughout my career, but today I want to go all the way back to my very first Full Package design: from Ideation to Manufacturing. The School of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati is where I started my professional training as a Fashion Designer. Its programs gave me opportunities that were unique and personalized so that I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my career when I graduated. I cannot sing its praises loudly enough, but I can give you a few snapshots of the work I did while there. At the end of my Sophomore year at DAAP, we were assigned our first full project: Children's Wear in two parts. The first part was to be inspired by a childhood memory (more on that project another time!) and the second was to be inspired by your favorite childhood cartoon. Since my favorite cartoon was (and is) Alice in Wonderland, I went through all of its colorful characters to find the one that I felt could give me a fun, wearable kids' outfit. I landed on Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Beginning with croquis sketches, through to flat technical sketches in Illustrator and finally to pattern-making and sewing, it was important that each step of the design process be documented and eventually graded for the quarter. The biggest compliment I received was during the final critique, when my 2-year-old model kept running laps around the presentation stage. She wouldn't stand still for the judges! I was sure they were going to be upset, but they told me, "Of all the projects we've seen today, very few of them allowed the children to feel comfortable enough to run around and play the way your model is doing right now. That is what Children's Wear is all about, so we think you nailed it!" From that day forward, insisting that fashion is not just about how you look but also so much about how you feel has become a mantra of mine. I still carry that with me today and it has become a pillar of what Unmarked Street stands upon. "Fashion has two purposes: Comfort and Love." - Coco Chanel