A Peak Into The Professional Profile of Sara Giles

Young, Beautiful, 

Successful…

A Peak Into The Professional Profile of Sara Giles

“Monday, Monday, Monday...” a title from a song by band Tegan and Sara and also a well known saying that expresses the fact that the dreaded Monday is here and the beginning of another work or school week begins. Most Mondays for me are tiring and full of work and preparation to get myself through the week, but this Monday I got the honor to have lunch with an old friend Sara Giles from Belle Plaine, MN and currently the Product Development Manager at Creative Apparel Concepts downtown. I met Sara when she came up to my family’s resort for vacation one summer when I was fifteen. It had been years since I seen her last and I was excited to hear about her ventures and the impact she’s having on the fashion industry in Minneapolis.
After exchanging a few emails, we decided to meet at C.A.C. offices downtown Monday, January 31st. She gave me a brief tour of the offices and informed me on the different departments within the company. It was very interesting to get a private “Behind The Scenes” look and get one-on-one interaction with such a talented and successful person in the industry. Following the tour, we left the offices and went down the street for lunch at a local bar and grill. We chatted away professional and friendly about topics for about an hour before she had to get back to work.
Sara attended Belle Plaine High School and graduated in 2004, which led her to Stout in Wisconsin to further her growing interest in Fashion Design. Although not directly related to design, she told me that some of her favorite classes were biology, principles of marketing, leadership, and portfolio. During the last semester of her senior year she heard about a fashion design internship for Express through one of her classmates and immediately went for it. She described the interviewing process as very casual and relaxed. “They were very excited and interested in what was coming out of the Mid-West” she said. She got the job as men’s casual bottoms-woven’s designer intern from June 1st, 2008 to June 20th, 2008. Shortly after being hired on as an intern she saw a position open for assistant designer for men’s knits and sweaters and eagerly went after it and got promoted! For the assistant designer position, it was a meeting separately with the senior knits designer, senior sweater designer, and the creative director for both knits and sweaters. She stayed under that title from June 22th, 2008 to June 20th, 2009.
I asked Sara what her most favorite and least favorite thing about Express was and she replied by saying, “I have many favorite things about Express: trending, seeing high end brands and finding ways to make it our own, the team – they were my family out there, full of energy, excited about their jobs.  My least favorite thing was the layoffs that we experienced halfway through.  I did not get laid off, but just being a part of that experience was difficult.”
Sara was leaning towards moving back to Minneapolis and heard about a company called, Creative Apparel Concepts and a job opening in Product Development Manager. She was frequently going back and forth from New York to Minnesota so it was convenient for her when applying for the position at this Minneapolis based company. After sending her resume and going through the interview process she was offered the job as a Product Development and Sourcing Manager and started in December of 2009. Creative Apparel Concepts was established in 2000 and is a screen-printing, commercial printing, and custom T-shirt company located in the Warehouse District in Minneapolis, MN. Some of their biggest clients are Wal-Mart, Gander Mountain, Harley Davidson and Munki Munki. Sara does sourcing for the products and works with the product development team overseeing that they are making the shirt right, up to code, and according to direction. Her day is filled with numbers, fabrics, sizes, innovated ideas, clients, meetings, and staying on top of deadlines. Sara says her biggest struggle within her job at Creative Apparel Concepts is, “ Managing time. Since it is a small company, everyone is required to carry more than their workload. In the midst of managing all things we want to establish processes but with very little time, this takes the back burner or personal time, unfortunately.” One of her favorite things are the people she works with who really made going to work a lot easier.
In our finals words to each other regarding her job at C.A.C. Sara expressed the rise in cotton prices and how difficult, but rewarding it is to manage the negotiating and financial responsibilities she holds in her position. “During this crazy economy the apparel industry is being hit very hard. The cotton prices are at an all time high, oil prices are sky rocketing therefore man-made fiber prices are increasing, political unrest in many areas of the world and the never ending labor unrest everywhere. Negotiating prices needs to occur within 24 hours to hold a price, which is how fast prices are moving on yarns. We are truly making history right now and it is amazing, stressful and interesting to see all the changes and how each company is coping” My last question I asked Sara is where she saw herself in five years she replied by saying, “I dream big! I see myself owning my own bridal business, carrying lines as well as doing custom designs and alterations.”