Journey of a Universal Garment is a series that lifts the curtain on the journey of our garments, from design to delivery. Having already spilled the beans on what goes down from design to production, next up we hear from Silvia from our UW. sales team.
Having freshly returned from presenting our latest collection to our sales agents and stockists worldwide, Silvia talks us through the next stage of the Universal Works garment and gives us the intel on what goes down in the "selling season".
"January and June are usually the most exciting months of the year for the Universal Works sales team, it's the time when we travel far and wide to see agents and our 200+ worldwide stockists.
Each season we travel, build our Paris showroom and set up our collections at trade shows all over the world.
For the past two years we haven't been able to do as much of that as we'd have liked, and the selling season descended quickly into makeshift fabric swatch-books and relying on zoom calls with dodgy wi-fi.
Don’t get me wrong, we are extremely grateful to have found alternative ways to present Universal Works to the world, but we wouldn’t say it was all fun and games!
Today, traveling is a little more complicated with rules changing, much testing, entry forms, and extra paperwork in the mix. This season we, in albeit reduced team numbers, finally had the chance to see our agents and stockists. We've been to London, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich, Paris, New York, Chicago and Copenhagen.
Of course, traveling comes with its perks, good food (hello European lunch breaks!!!) great company, and you can’t beat those long morning walks to the showroom taking in the city's incredible architecture and enjoying a nice coffee.
It is amazing to see how each of our agents has worked so hard to build a safe and beautiful environment for our stockists to visit and browse the collections. From building division walls in our showroom, to renting rural modernist villas to show the collection in, we know many of our agents have traveled far to reach stockists that weren't comfortably traveling and generally all have worked together to help keep things moving forward.
Two years was a long time without seeing those familiar faces that we see as our extended “UW family”. They are the people that excite us and remind us why we do the work we do.
We learn so much from these people. We listen to their feedback, and love to see their reaction to fabrics and new shapes; it's one of the most rewarding parts of the selling season.
In the end, it is for them, the reason why we do it all."
