L’Atelier Marey: Textile Heritage conservation for designers

Creating an inspirational fabrics & prints library for daily use

Designers rely heavily on different sources of inspiration. The Atelier Marey, a textile company based in Paris, had the opportunity to drastically extend its drawings and prints content.
The challenge was to secure and valorize this creative capital.

The New Artisans designed a strategy and project organization to address 3 goals:

  1. Secure and preserve more than 15.000+ old textiles and prints physical samples
  2. Valorize this content by making it easily usable by in-house textile designers in their creation process
  3. Promote the samples by making them physically accessible to customers (fashion-designer, material buyers) in a compelling presentation

Once the strategy and macro-budget approved the company moved forward allowing The New Artisans to:

  • Design a made to mesure storage room and boxes for daily use: from furnitures to conservation quality containers for the samples as well as finding and supervising the suppliers.
    The room allows a growth of the collection for the next decade
  • Find and supervise providers for an industrialized digitization process of the 15.000+ samples. Every sample is tagged with its unique ID and barcode and physically organized in macro categories.
    Digitization had to be done on-site so textile-designers could participate to the correct sorting while the digitization chain is in progress
  • Find a provider for a Collection Management System to provide an easy-to-use digital library with intuitive cataloguing, image recognition, customer prints selections
  • Train designers to the digital library and future cataloguing
1st Project draft for the storage room – Illustration by Julien Pajot The New Artisans

About the author

Julien Pajot

15+ Years of experience serving artisans and leaders in the clothing and accessories industries.

By Julien Pajot

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