Week 4-Late post!

Ok, this was definitely NOT something I had planned to do, and yes it is late but luckily nothing too staggering happened during this week so I can easily sum up the week's observations. Please try to imagine I wrote this at the end of week for!!

Week 4 was my last week and the second to last week for the Sketchbook Pop Up shop, which will be closing next Thursday. It was business as usual for much of the week, writing blog posts and still visiting a few press days. One of my solo outings included a visit to the Gucci Pop Up shop in Covent Garden on which I did a review, and have to admit was not very thrilling or impressive. It totally lacked in personality and certain wasn't very customer friendly...

But, disappointment aside, the most important function of the week had to be Sketchbook's presence at The Live Issue Launch, which was SB pop up shop's project manager, Rachel Menashy's peers' project. The idea was that it was supposed to resemble some sort of live magazine with designers, videos and examples of a/w10 collections and lots and lots of loud music. The whole night seemed a bit crazy and ambiguous, but it was Sketchbook's job to set up and area where we did some live blogging. We had to pull anyone we could out of the crowd (preferably someone better known) and interview them for a "5 minutes with" that was posted on the blog. We did struggle with the actual LIVE BLOGGING thing because there wasn't actually any internet, so there we sat on out laptops, typing people's answers and telling a white lie saying "yes we really are blogging this now..."The blogs did go up... just not until the morning! The event was fun, again I got to ask people's opinions on print and online publishing, but since the whole event was very much based around a wide range of mediums there was such a varied response. Of course, photographers all expressed how digital was the way forward, as did other bloggers, while the more romantic and old fashioned still seemed to lust after print.

Another development for the week, which we unfortunately managed to miss, was The Business of Fashion interviewing Jefferson Hack (creator of Dazed and Confused, Dazed Digital and AnOther Magazine) as the first installment of TBoF's Fashion Pioneers series. We missed going to the event which was held at the Sanderson Hotel in London on 29th April 2010 and discussed in detail the changing the fashion and publishing industry as we know it. Dazed Digital was one of the first online publications to hit the internet and who better to talk about it than the creator himself. Thankfully the video how now been uploaded back on to BoF's blog so I can go back and have a look at it for research purposes. It really struck a chord with Wafa though, she really has such an admiration for the development of the industry and I noticed how much she is keen to stay on top of what the BoF is talking about and, of course, other fashion and publishing pioneers.

The BoF, by the way, is a blog that looks at the development and news of brands, designers and anything to do with fashion, but with more of a business relevance.

Later in the week, on Thursday, I was in charge of running the shop while Wafa worked at Dia. That day we had a talk on my two of the blogging world's well know fashion street style bloggers, Street Style London and The Style Crusader. Two women, both American but very at home and comfortable with London life and style. The were running a work shop on how to improve your blog and how to make it really work for you. It was such an insightful discussion and everyone came away having picked up several tips and ready and raring to go away and sort their blogs out. Again, this had more relevance to online publishing and the development of self publishing. More and more people are turning to blogs, but with so many out there, how do you sort through them to find the one that is actually any good. An issue I am now starting to think of is how Sketchbook manages to keep itself different, unusual and independent of all other "typical" fashion blogs.


Before I left I managed to get  a good hour's interview and discussion with Wafa about Sketchbook Magazine, the blog and the pop up shop. I was trying to get her personal opinion on where she thought Sketchbook was headed and if she though, realistically she could make Sketchbook work carrying on in the same way, even when the pop up shop is gone (which seems to be one of the better known attributes to the brand). I asked her if she thought she would stay in one particular medium eventually, either print or digitial and of course, her opinion on the whole print vs digital battle and how the planned to run Sketchbook from the start. But you'll have to wait for the transcript and report to see what she told me.

Great placement and hopefully a successful case study - though I have a feeling an awful lot of it will be made up for discussing what i observed rather than hard, statistical proof.