Print and Design Assistant

About Us:

We are the women of Sahara. We are unconstrained. Our adventurous spirit leads us beyond the High Street to destinations lesser known. For clothes that mean more. That add to the story of our lives. We are unique. Try and pin us down, it doesn’t work. Label us and it won’t stick. We believe that demographics divide, age is just a state of mind and body type is what each one of us sees in the mirror. We are leaders. Visionaries in our own right. Creative, passionate - and only ever underestimated once.

Sahara - A family-run business that has been creating collections for the free-spirited, independent woman for the past four decades.

Overview of the role:

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a super-organised and creative Print and Design Assistant at our Primrose Hill Head Office on a full-time, in-house basis.

The Role

The Print and Design Assistant is a pivotal role in the organisation of the muti product Design department which helps to support and facilitate the creativity of the department. It’s an important and diverse role; one which requires excellent communication, organisation and textile design skills, predominantly in printed textiles.

As a person, you will naturally be creative with a well-developed sense of colour and an innate love and knowledge of woven and jersey textile fabrics and prints. You will be able to work to tight deadlines within a fast-paced environment and thrive in a busy department with ever changing priorities. With a Textile or Print Design degree and internship/work experience under your belt or with several years working in a similar textile design role, you will be keen to progress in your textile design path.

Core Responsibilities

Working within a busy design team, your responsibilities whilst not exhaustive, will include:

• Assisting in the research of trends within Sahara’s market, helping Sahara’s Designers to continue to develop and evolve Sahara’s collections
• Managing and maintaining the archive of past season's best-selling styles and keep records of all fabrics, ensuring the archive is kept well-organised and documented
• Ordering strike offs and keeping a record of their costs and lead times
• Liaising between Production, Design, Merchandising and Wholesale departments, feeding back information on product performance and general comments where necessary
• Providing general administration support for the design department daily
• Handing over collection to Production at the end of the season
• Creating seasonal line sheets for relevant departments

Textile Design based

• Assisting the Designers with the production of their seasonal colour palettes, helping with print and fabric sourcing
• Manipulating imagery, colours, rescale/resize, recolour etc using Adobe Suite
• Developing prints into repeat, managing bought artworks, and creating hand drawn and painted artworks when necessary
• Arranging print appointments with studios and mills for bought artworks and new printable bases
• Understanding of different print bases and print techniques suitable for these varying bases
• Sending out print packs, colour standards and artworks to suppliers and managing the colour and scale consistency throughout
• Managing all strike offs & sampling fabric, including packing and sending/receiving fabric rolls from print mills
• Setting up & maintaining fabric database for each season relating to all printed textiles
• Updating and archiving style files and physical samples
• Translating designer sketches & creating specs using Illustrator & Excel and actioning first samples with factories

Experience, skills and knowledge:

• Textile Design Degree or Printed Textile Design Degree
• Knowledge of Pattern Cutting and Garment construction is a bonus
• One years’ experience in a Printed Textile role
• High level of proficiency in Adobe Suite
• Excellent working knowledge of Excel, Microsoft 365
• Organised
• Good communication skills
• Flexible
• Can-do attitude
• Ability to organise workload according to priority and deadlines
• Thrives within a fast-paced environment

We offer:

• a relaxed, non-corporate working environment
• a great community of creative, passionate-minded people
• a strong likelihood of making friends for life (the majority of our employees have!)
• a competitive salary
• a generous holiday allowance
• discretionary annual bonus
• access to exclusive perks and discounts via Perkbox
• a generous staff discount
• Organic fruit, great coffee and Prosecco every Friday afternoon

Sahara is passionate about working with great people & building inspirational, creative teams. We spend a lot of time at work, so we know how important it is to enjoy your working day and we do so in beautiful offices with an abundance of natural light. We promote a friendly, non-corporate environment at our HQ; we are passionate and hard-working and enjoy socialising both in and out of the office and we are always looking for like-minded individuals to join us on our fun and creative journey.