If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair by Anya Hindmarch

Author:Anya Hindmarch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

6

Creativity Will Eat Strategy for Breakfast

When I was about sixteen, a girl who had recently left the school came back to talk about her career in fashion. Afterwards I went back to my desk and I sketched a shop full of handbags, with me standing outside it and my name on the door. It was my way of saying to myself: This is what I want to do.

Two years later I had left school and was in Florence, the home of leather and the home of handbags, ostensibly doing a two-month language course to learn Italian, but what I was really doing was learning about the craftsmen, learning about the leather markets and the factories, and noticing that all the Italian girls were wearing a really cool drawstring duffel bag. Seven years after that – hard and sometimes lonely years building a wholesale business – I opened my first store, on Walton Street, and it was full of handbags and it had my name on it.

I didn’t know it then, but the shop I drew aged sixteen was my first ever creative visualisation.

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I love and admire proper craftspeople, who are obsessive about the way things are made: the kinds of people who work on my products, or people like my mother-in-law who always had some embroidery or papier-mâché project on the go. I love how they are always asking: Couldn’t we . . . ? and How about if we just . . . ? and Could I try . . . ? I love the combination of artistry, technical nous and obsessive dedication: the way they work things out not just in their heads but also in their hands, by doing and making and trying different things. For me, craftspeople are the true creatives (and the true heroes of my business).

For a long time I didn’t really appreciate my own creativity, or like to call myself creative, because I had no formal training in art or design. I wasn’t the arty kid at school, particularly. I didn’t do an art foundation course, I didn’t go to fashion college, I didn’t even do art GCSE and I’m really not very good at drawing. Everything I know about fashion, design and craftsmanship I have learnt on the job, from talking to people in the business, watching craftspeople and trying to make things work. But I came to realise that this was not a bad way to learn, especially for someone like me. I was always pretty impatient with classroom learning, probably because of being a little bit dyslexic. I also came to realise that creativity comes in many forms. I might not be great at drawing but I like to think I have good ideas – both in terms of having vision and in terms of then generating problem-solving ideas for how to make it happen. If my brain spits out ideas, it can be as useful as being good at drawing.

There is creativity everywhere. It is incredibly important in business and I don’t just mean in the so-called creative industries, but in every business.

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