EVALUATION:

Mind Your Own Business has been filled with experience, stress, laughter and creativity. It has been a whirlwind of emotions and has provided me with a voice I didn’t think I had. Working in a creative collective with a variety of like-minded individuals all of whom came from a variety of different disciplines was incredibly interesting and allowed our group to be filled with a vast amount of creative, unique and extraordinary ideas. Although working in a group was exciting and enabled me to make new friends and connections within the CSAD building it also had its flaws. For a group project to be successful everyone needs to be committed, passionate and motivated to achieve an end goal; I found that one person within the group didn’t pull their weight which was incredibly frustrating and annoying.

However, this did not let the rest of the group lose their passion for the project, it increased our motivation to work as hard as we possibly could to obtain the result, we believed we deserved. Being a part of the business Consilio has allowed me to gain additional skills and experience which I can take back and potentially use for my interior design career in the future. I had never used a sewing machine properly or used materials such as bonder webbing to attach different materials together.

This was all new to me and scary at the time as I was worried my lack of experience would let the group down. Harleigh (textiles student) and Daria (Fashion Student) had experience within this field and showed me how to complete the processes required to make the laptop sleeves. My main job was to carefully cut out each material and bond them together using the steam iron and sheets of bonder webbing. Later, in the production process, I was also given the task of sewing the personalised buttons onto the cases. I thoroughly enjoyed learning new skills and was fascinated by the processes required to bond materials together in an easy and efficient way.

In addition, I was given the important job of taking care of the finance for this project; I volunteered to take care of this job as I believe I am incredibly efficient and sensible when it comes to spending money and can easily make excel spreadsheets which can record Consilio’s expenditure and profits. As the project progressed, I become more and more comfortable in the processes required to take place within the development of our business. At times we felt as though the production of our laptop sleeves was not correct as they were not being produced to the quality we required. This meant that there were multiple times within the 5-week project where we had to go back to the drawing board and re-design the sleeve to make it easier to make and to increase its aesthetic appearance. Although this was incredibly frustrating it provided us with several prototypes and allowed us to show the development of our product as the weeks went on; this made selling the finalised laptop sleeve incredibly personal due to the amount of hard work which went into the creation of the product.