An internship with Tetrad.
Started: October 2018
Finished: December 2018
Tetrad is a huge company designing and manufacturing on site luxurious sofas and chairs. They have worked with Harris Tweed, Mulberry and Ralph Lauren as well as selling their own collections, Heritage and FF with furniture brands such as SCS and Furniture Village.
With the company being so close to home, I emailed their HR director and asked if I could get some work experience for a few months. They situated me in the prototype department with their creative director, which meant I was able to get a view on how they come up with new sofas and attend meetings with clients from the Designers Guild and Spink & Edgar.
My job involved establishing an archive, creating moodboards to pitch to clients, attend photoshoots, name products and new fabrics, contribute to designing and help to pack the sets for national and international exhibitions as well as designing a lining for their FF collection with potential to be used in future products.
Having a factory onsite, meant I could see the different departments need to manufacture a sofa. For instance I was able to see them making the frames, to cutting and sewing the fabric and upholstering it onto the frames. I worked in the swatch department too helping them make Mulberry swatch books as well as Harris Tweed, Heritage and FF books.
One of the responsibilities I had was to oversee the manufacturing of 500+ Harris Tweed dogs to be given out as gifts to trade shows. I chose the fabric the dogs were to be made out of and trained people to sew and fill them.
Tetrad had more of a professional atmosphere in comparison to Oxfam. This was good as I was able to see how a big company works, sells products and makes money. Being the only intern there, they treated me like a 'real' member of the team - which i think really benefited me.