Collaborative Challenge

Critical Self-Assessment

Name: Shenning Li

Student ID: 20006731

Degree: MA Fashion Design Management

Academic Year: 2021/22

Unit Leaders: Tiff Radmore & Abigail Jones

Collaborative Challenge: Culture Club

Team Supervisor: Colette Meacher

Personal Padlet Page:

Word Count: 1965

I, Shenning Li, certify that is an original piece of work. I have acknowledged all sources
and citations. No section of this essay has been plagiarized. In the writing of this critical
self-assessment, I have received assistance from Jeremy Stanford from LCF Academic
Support.

Critical assessment:
A purposeful critical reflection can change the way people think about issues and can

help people look at them from multiple perspectives. (Williams, Woolliams, Spiro, 2012)

The purpose of writing this reflection is to reflect on the experience of this class, to tell a

story about my time in this collaborative group session and to reflect on my personality,

experiences and thoughts. I will present my reflective assessment in five different areas:

the reasons why I chose this project, the experience of working with a team, the

challenge and regrets I encountered, a self-reflection and the final conclusion.

Reasons of choosing Culture Club:

I am really looking forward to the whole collaborative course, because this is the first

group work I have done since coming to London College of Fashion. I have always

believed that the power of collaboration is endless, it gives me the opportunity to

communicate with students with different background, that will give me a new perspective

on the fashion industry and even the world.

When I saw the brief of Culture Club, I was fascinated by the common goal of “create a

fashion revolution”. Everyone is welcomed to come and join this collaborative course, no

matter what your major and background is. The main mission of this course was to build

a sustainable fashion brand, design a capsule collection of this brand, create a marketing

strategy to promote the brand and a three years business plan to help the brand go

global.

The reason of why I choose this unit is that I want to create my own brand in the future

and I hope that this course will provide me with some inspiration for creating a brand

through networking and collaboration. Meanwhile, sustainable fashion is a topic that I am

really interested in, and I think it's really cool to be able to create a sustainable brand.

The experience of working with a team:

I was very proactive in contacting the other group members as soon as the group list was

released and showed my enthusiasm. (CAF,2020) We had a very successful first

meeting, everyone came to the offline meeting and we were very efficient. After the first

meeting we decided on the general direction of the brand we wanted to create, a

sustainable street brand with casual clothing. What we wanted to create was a

sustainable fashion brand that was affordable for everyone. Once we decided on the

style of the brand, we started assigning tasks. There were five of us in the group, from

different majors. There was a menswear designer, a fashion photographer and a fashion

magazine editor. My initial idea was to take up the position of designer, as my

undergraduate degree was in textile design and I thought design was my strong point.

However, as most of the members of our group were from design backgrounds and no

one was a business major, and as a fashion management student, I was appointed as a

brand planner and my task was mainly to create a business plan and do some research

for the pre-build of the brand.

Our next few meetings didn't go so well and we met online instead as we all had our own

assignments to complete and everyone had different schedules. On the positive side, we

made effective use of a variety of teamwork software to maximise our online

communication, using Microsoft Teams for group meetings, Google Doc and Padlet to

show progress and results. I could feel the enthusiasm and effort put into the project

upfront and everyone was doing their part to keep the team on track.

This enthusiasm did not last very long, however, as people reported on their tasks less

and less frequently and organised fewer and fewer meetings. Everyone seemed to be

concentrating on their own courses and gradually neglecting the collaborative course.

This state of affairs continued until our second progress report to Colette and the

feedback she gave us made us realise that we still had a long way to go before the final

outcome. We explained to Colette where we were and the problems we were

encountering, and she was very understanding of our situation and gave us some

suggestions, for example, by refining the specific division of mission for each individual. I

suggested that I could be responsible for customer profiling and brand positioning, the

brand USP and marketing. I think that if there are any more group work sessions in the

future, I would suggest at the beginning that everyone's tasks are broken down so as to
ensure that everyone is clear on their tasks and that will achieve a more efficient

collaboration.

Before the final presentation, we organised the last offline meeting, this meeting was

another great experience for me in terms of group work. Every member of the group

participated in this meeting and we booked a large meeting room to practice for

tomorrow's presentation. Everyone was very focused and active in presenting their ideas,

and we rearranged the order of the slides and divided up the work among everyone. We

practised over and over again to make sure we didn't overrun our presentations and

would give everyone some feedback. A prerequisite for successful collaboration is mutual

understanding and the expectation of differences in the quality of contributions from

different members, as well as learning to listen to what team members have to say. (De,

VJ, Laske, 2020)

Challenges and regret:

The biggest challenge I encountered throughout the collaboration was developing a

sustainable plan for this new brand, I've done a lot of research on other brands and I've

found that the way most brands achieve sustainability is by using organic or recycled

materials, being more transparent in their supply chain and having a recycling business.

As a fledgling brand, how to ensure sustainability while still keeping the brand profitable

is something I need to think about in the longer term. As our brand is relatively modestly

priced, we are limited in our choice of sustainable materials. We needed to choose a

material that was both environmentally friendly and also affordable, which made it

considerably more difficult for me. I realised that we could shift our thinking a bit, for

example by finding some new techniques to achieve sustainability. After a lot of research

by myself and another member of the group, we have finally found a green machine

that recycles textiles and it is offered at cost price, so it is perfect for our brand in

terms of price. Through this challenge, I think I have developed the ability to adapt

my thinking quickly and remain open-minded, developing my agility. (CAF,2020)

The second challenge that I have met was in pricing, the brand that we want to
create is an affordable sustainable brand, we need to ensure the price was moderate

and will fit into most people’s spending budgets. As we have no experience in this

area, we cannot decide this price entirely on a subjective basis. So we decided to do

some primary research, we made a questionnaire which included respondents' age

and occupation, their monthly income and budget for clothing. About 200 people took

part in the survey and based on their feedback we finalised the price of the product

and I created a customer profile based on the data from the questionnaire. This skill

could be important to me in the future because the primary research is highly efficient

and the data obtained is realistic, objective and uniform.

Another challenge I met was about team work. One of our team members missed

several group meetings and we were initially unaware of the reasons and could not

even get in touch with him. He responded after our meetings on the pretext that he

was busy with his professional classes. At first, I felt very anxious that because of his

absence, we could not know his progress and how much work he had done. The rest

of us in the group were also worried that our progress would be slowed down if he

did not finish the part he was responsible for on time. A few days before the

debriefing, we finally received his reply and his work, and it was a great relief to me

that he had indeed completed his task.

I often think that life is a process full of regrets and there is no such thing as perfection in

the world. The biggest regret for me in this course was that because of COVID-19, all our

content was online, our group meetings, our final presentations were all online. I think it

was a lot less experiential and engaging, and we didn't have the opportunity to have

physical contact with our supervisors. And as a collaborative course, I think collaboration

and real-time communication between everyone is very necessary. But it was because of

the online delivery that I improved my proactivity and I took the initiative to schedule

group meetings to maximise our effectiveness as much as possible.

Self-reflection:

The aim of the SWOT analysis is to enable me to gain a deeper understanding of myself
and my practice through this form. A personal SWOT analysis could help people with

their personal development. (Martin, 2019)

Table 1: Personal SWOT Analysis

My strengths in this collaborative project are clear. I had created a fashion brand when I

was at university, and although I no longer manage it now, I have gained some

experience in brand building. Coupled with my postgraduate studies in fashion

management, I have learnt a lot about business analysis, so the combination of my

previous experience and the expertise I now have, I am well placed to excel in this

course. At the same time, I think I am a logical thinker and creative person, I am well

organised in what I do, I can show a unique understanding or perspective and I will think

over every decision before I make it and analyse the feasibility of the decision from

multiple aspects.

However, my downfall is my procrastination and I put off many tasks until the last few

days. I know this is a bad habit and I need to take my time to change myself. This flaw

also causes me to become anxious easily and not very confident in my ideas. Due to

procrastination, many of my ideas and opinions are not validated, so I shy away from

expressing my thoughts during group discussions. I would like to thank my group

members for encouraging me and giving me the confidence to express myself by

acknowledging my ideas.

At the same time, this project has opened my eyes to great opportunities, as I have met

students from different professional backgrounds and different countries, and together we

have been able to create a fashion brand and use our respective expertise. In the

process, I learnt about different disciplines and the experience I gained from interacting

with them will lay the foundation for the personal brand I want to create in the future.

The biggest threat for me was time management, I needed to work on three courses at

the same time and having three consecutive days of deadlines in the last week was really

a huge pressure for me. This pressure not only affected my study progress, but also my

routine. The next thing I need to do is to find a way to balance stress and life and learn

how to manage my time.

Conclusion:

Overall this collaborative challenge course has improved my interpersonal

communication skills. I understood that a successful teamwork often requires mutual

cooperation and progress. As a member of a team, it is not only necessary to have

individual abilities, but also to use your strengths in different positions and to coordinate

and cooperate with other members. I believe that this experience will help me a lot in the

future, as it has helped me to develop my agility, proactivity and resilience. (CAF,2020)

Reference:

Williams, K, Woolliams, M, & Spiro, J (2012) Reflective Writing, Macmillan Education UK,
London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. (Accessed: 3 January 2021).

De, VJ, & Laske, O (2020) Practices of Dynamic Collaboration : A Dialogical Approach to
Strengthening Collaborative Intelligence in Teams, Springer International Publishing AG,
Cham. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. (Accessed: 3 January 2021).

Martin, M. (2019) How to Do a Personal SWOT Analysis. Available at:

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5543-personal-swot-analysis.html (Accessed: 4
January 2021).

University of the Arts London (2020) Creative Attributes Framework. Available at:
https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/teaching-and-learning-exchange/careers
andemployability/creative-attributes-framework (Accessed: 4 January 2021).