As part of our Boost My Business initiative Fiona Alston spoke to two Irish designers who channelled their creative streak during lockdown.
Emily Jean O Byrne relies heavily on the wedding market in her atelier, Emily Jean Millinery, in Moycullen, Co Galway. Weddings makes up 80% of her business, the rest being hats and head pieces for race meetings and special events.
"Clients will come to me with their outfit, it's very much done on a consultation basis," she explains. "We do a couple of fittings after they've chosen their hat and I guide and advise them on styles and colours to match."
The Galway Festival is always a busy time for the business, but this year racing was held behind closed doors leaving a rather large whole in the Galway events calendar.
"Galway race week is such a highlight of the social calendar of events and fundraising. It was a big blow to be honest, for me and for Galway in general, it hit us hard," says O Byrne.
"The orders were just starting to come in, I'd had a few appointments already, I’d been to my trade show and ordered my materials and fabrics for the summer ahead. And then lockdown happened - it was an extremely worrying time," she says.
"Towards the end of March, I was chatting with family and wondering if I’d have to close down – was I pulling down the shutters?"
Luckily, the ladies who’d already ordered their wedding hats still collected their orders on the premise the weddings would at some stage be going ahead. She did not have one call asking her for their money back.
"That gave me a little bit of a cushion to think about things and see what the way forward was," she says.
"My back was to the wall. Underneath it all, innately, I'm a passionate designer. After nearly 15 years in business I'm very much a businesswoman now, but it all stems from the creativity, wanting to design, and wanting to make ladies happy and confident," explains O Byrne.
"That’s what I went back to when the virus hit and I thought even if I do close my doors. I'm never going to stop making things or creating things." she adds.
This is where the idea of the turband came from. It is as it sounds, a cross between a turban and a head band.
"I started thinking the turban style, so could be worn casually and then I had to tick the box of it being affordable as the times are so sensitive and challenging for people," she says.
Researched showed that ladies were looking for something to wear in their Zoom calls to cover their 'lockdown roots’.
"Once promoted a little bit like that, and the fact the turband is a bit unique in itself and a play on words, I launched them in the first week in May, and they haven't stopped selling since."
Emily Jean Millinery has reopened now and the weddings are slowly starting to return. Due to the change in circumstances O Byrne is in the fortunate position where she was able to add a team member.
"I'm delighted to say that I was able to actually increase profits with the turbands due to the volume that I was selling them and I actually had to take somebody on so and my business will kind of transformed online to be honest," she adds.
Over in Duleek, Co Meath another designer who found a new creative streak during the country’s closure was Shane Holland, owner of Shane Holland Design Workshops.
The designers and makers of lighting, furniture, awards and sculptural works since 1991 closed its doors during the period but since reopening business is slowly picking up.
"At the moment, we're working on some medical awards for eye doctors, which are going to Paris. With the online culture I thought we were dead ducks completely in relation to our awards gigs - we certainly will be down 50% in that area which is really serious, but we're still making various bits and pieces for people," Shane Holland said.
"It’s a good sign that people are still knocking on my door but it's definitely been very badly hit," he added.
In the initial part of lockdown Shane, along with his laser technician Fergal, made visors consisting of a laser cut head band and some locally sourced flexible plastic.
For the most part these were supplied not-for-profit to medical people in the area and were also available to buy for any businesses.
"We didn’t really depend on the visors," he says, "we just put it up as a thing we could do and it kept me busy for five or six weeks when people were fairly frantic trying to figure out where to get these products, particularly for care homes before things arrived from China."
The first bit of work to pick up was the bespoke lighting they create. As the construction industry restarted activity, the demand for these bespoke type pieces returned. They also prepared a global shipment of Irish harps.
"That's a big job for us for the Department of Foreign Affairs, and that job is due to go out next week - 20 plaques for the Irish Embassies and Consulates around the world," explains Holland.
"We work with Athy Co-op Foundry who produce the castings and then they come up to Duleek for all the finishing, painting, and brackets. We're fortunate to have that kind of bread and butter work, which is very important for a studio like ours."
The alone time in the workshop also gave Holland plenty of time to give the space a tidy up, but with a difference. He created his ‘Covid castings’ from bits and pieces he had spare around the workspace, sorted only by colour.
"They all ended up in these sort of almost pizza like castings," says Holland. "It was a fun thing to do to cast them into a circular disc - yellow ones, green ones, black ones. Also, some artwork came out of the visor project as well using all these skeletons of leftover acrylic from the laser process - that was quite colourful," he explains.
"The two months that I had almost to myself in the workshop was great, I was just casting away in the background," he added.
The issue Shane is now facing is getting his art exhibited. He runs the group Design Island and under normal circumstances they would have been exhibiting at the Galway Arts Festival but many of the venues didn’t open so it’s a project that has now been postponed.
"We are open to opportunities to show it, whichever way it comes about," he adds.
