My artistic inclination and love for clothes naturally led me to pursue a career in print and design. Without Nigerian parents forcing me towards a specialism in law or medicine, I had the freedom to follow my heart. After earning a bachelor’s degree in surface design from the London College of Communication (UAL), I founded my British-Nigerian-inspired fashion brand, Yemzi. I launched with eco-friendly white racer tops and t-shirts digitally printed with wild cats that I sketched on my Wacom tablet.

At a university crafts fair, I first experienced the thrill of having a stranger part with their money and take a little piece of my imagination home for the first time. An international student purchased greeting cards featuring my inky watercolor prints for a few pounds apiece. Then, a couple of years after graduating, I needed to find my customers. I researched the top African boutiques and pitched my tops to them, landing on my first retailer, Soboye boutique, in Shoreditch.

Now, many years on as an art director, creativity and pitching are central to my role. It has many overlapping skills with entrepreneurial fashion designers who I think are particularly well-suited for a career in the ad industry.

Fashioning a brand

Fashion designers who create a brand from scratch inherently understand the importance of aesthetics, style, and storytelling. We build a brand around a target customer (often ourselves), catering to a particular kind of person. This skill is transferable when we understand how to adapt tones of voices and design choices to different audiences. This is often the case in a brand’s infancy as you sus out who resonates with your product and their psychographics.

In the same way, an art director could be juggling a handful of briefs and find themselves writing for a client that wants to launch their latest range of beauty cosmetics, and then hours later, they’ll be ideating for a campaign led by football talent. It could be for the same brand or not, but you have to find the nuances, the tweaking of words and their typeface, the shift of color palette or expressions in the subjects’ faces in the storyboard, the visual references and directors that are experts in capturing the energy that speaks to the narrative and call to action.

Fashion designers and art directors are experts in filling a blank canvas with emotion. The storytelling, creative concepts and techniques, and intertwining references. We know how to build and curate campaign visuals, whether still or moving images. An eye for craft and detail may be our most valuable asset. We are highly attuned to trends in industry and wider culture – also relevant in advertising for creating relevant and effective campaigns.

Having spent time working on the Toyota account at T&PM, I learned how much work goes into creating brand worlds, from the intricacies of typography to the specifics of shoot locations. Much like the most renowned fashion houses, such as Chanel or Louis Vuitton, everything is considered, and nothing is left to chance. Just like a Pantone color for fabric in a designer’s collection is chosen, the large brands are considering color palettes with similar precision in their communications.

For a light commercial vehicle brochure shoot we shot in Spain, we considered the colors, textures, styles and silhouettes of the model’s wardrobe, each element adhering to the tight guidance of the brand book, which was meticulously made by senior creatives dedicated to the Toyota account.

In my most recent project, Nationwide was challenged to bring awareness of its student card to first-year university students. The cross-section of them offering a £120 JustEat voucher and the fact that many students are managing their finances independently for the first time and not feeling confident doing so led me to an Amelia Dimoldenberg Chicken Shop Date inspired idea, where a potentially awkward conversation could be made fun during freshers. Hosted by GK Barry and Harry Pinero, they dropped nuggets (of food and financial literacy) for new students at the ‘NationFried’ restaurant activation. Being tapped into British youth culture allowed me to find inspiration for a banking client’s problem.

@gkbarry AD | Calling all Freshers! I served up more than my usual flirty bants, dishing out plenty of fried chicken and all the vibes at #NationFried with @Harry Pinero a pop-up takeaway created to shout about Nationwide’s FlexStudent perks, including £120 of Just Eat vouchers and £100 cash head to the @Nationwide Building Society ♬ original sound – Grace

Independent fashion designers are hands-on across the business, so when it comes to marketing and selling their collections, they know who the hot upcoming talent to collaborate with is from athletes, musicians and content creators. And that’s often before a multi-million-pound business seeks them out as brand ambassadors. I’ve managed to place Yemzi products on NBA star Brandon Ingram, MTV award-winning musician Tiwa Savage, and on Niamh McCormack in the Netflix series Everything Now.

I achieved this with no budget, just a mix of my entrepreneurial spirit and the power of networking. I sent Brandon a direct message on Instagram telling him I was sending him one of my silk durags. Very bold, very confident, not at all demure.

The other two amazing opportunities came about thanks to collaboration and the relationships I have built with fashion stylists before their big breaks styling stars.

How to get the collabs

In a similar approach, I landed my first job in advertising by directly messaging Erik Kessels, founder of KesselKramer, the “legendary and unorthodox” independent advertising agency.

During my year studying advertising at SCA2.0, I entered the D&AD New Blood awards and won two pencils. Fifty winners were invited to participate in a two-week program called The Academy, which had a live brief, workshops and talks by industry experts. Erik’s presentation inspired me so much that I wanted to work for his agency as a junior creative. He kindly replied with Dave Bell’s email address. As an upcoming creative, you need that entrepreneurial spirit to make the work you want to see in the world. That requires problem-solving skills, resilience, and adaptability. I’ve seen how these skills have got me in the door and pushed work ‘over the line’ for client approval.

While being an independent fashion designer means the budgets are extremely tight, my frugalness came in handy when there was a tight turnaround for a J2O social brief last summer. I took pride in not only selling in the creative concepts but also taking the reigns on casting and styling with a lot of my contacts and personal wardrobe. I enjoyed the creative freedom to cast and dress the talent and lending a household drinks brand a bit of my bold, colorful vibe in their communications.

It’s often a relief to have large production spend, although I’m aware I was born after the golden era of advertising with mind-blowing budgets. Still, it amazed me that briefs would call for the right superstar talent, and my suggestion soon turned into accounts people having six-figure conversations with talent managers.

A creative director filtered and nurtured my creative routes. Accounts people kept us all on track, setting meetings, helping us adhere to deadlines, and communicating with clients. The experience of handling complex projects, from concept to production, often on tight timelines, has helped my transition to the equally fast-paced advertising world.

When a creative brief is dropped on my desk, I approach it with a similar strategy to starting a collection. Lots of research, looking for insights and finding the crux of the problem. All creatives need to assert their opinions and decisions clearly and confidently while collaborating with other professionals. A fashion designer knows not to leave a technical pack open to interpretation when handed over to the factory. And an art director doesn’t write a script with Rihanna in Barbados, to find themselves shooting a Eurovision song contest winner in Margate (no offence to either).

Being sure of oneself and developing assertiveness is useful in ensuring that the creative is developed and executed according to the vision.

I’ve successfully turned my doodles into wearable designs, campaign lines and television commercials, and I’d love to see more fashion creatives make a seamless career shift into advertising because there aren’t enough people from diverse backgrounds and educations in these establishments.

They are so often echo chambers of similar viewpoints and taste, recycled and rebranded. Entrepreneurial fashion designers bring a unique blend of creativity, branding expertise, trend awareness, storytelling skills, attention to detail, problem-solving abilities, collaboration experience, an entrepreneurial mindset, marketing acumen, and a strong aesthetic sense to the advertising field. It turned out that daydreaming can be a path to exciting paid realities.

Connect with Lem here. And read her previous piece here.