Header

Uniform Designer

Description
POSITION

Bridge International Academies is looking for an experienced fashion designer to develop our very first line of uniforms for pupils! You will be responsible for dressing millions of children for success in parts of the world where they have never had this opportunity. Thanks to you, millions of children living in slums and other low-resource communities will go to class looking smart, feeling proud, and aspiring to succeed.
This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for someone with the right mix of creativity and entrepreneurism! Our first run will be no less than 100,000 uniforms and within a year we’d likely add another 300,000. In the next 10 years, Bridge International Academies will have more than 10,000,000 children as its pupils.

PROJECT

Our primary need is daily uniforms for both boys and girls. As our academies go from ages 3-15, these uniforms will need to vary by age and size. For example, Early Childhood Development classes (ages 3-6) will look different from those in Primary (ages 6 and up). Likewise, uniforms will need to allow some flexibility in order to accommodate religious needs (e.g. head scarves for Muslim girls). We’d also like to look into P.E. uniforms and casual-day uniforms – both of these are common in the countries we serve, and plan to serve, in Africa and Asia. We will be able to provide some research and guidance into the designs, including current trends in our communities, but expect that the person in this role join us with some preconceived ideas as we will need to move incredibly quickly. We’d like to have these uniforms ready for sale come January 2014.

Our uniforms need to be incredibly low-cost. The families we serve live on less than $2 a day per person. We need the person in this role to be able to think with a very clear, and very low, budget in mind as it’s essential that our uniform are affordable for all of our families. The quantities we’ll be ordering should help drive down costs (our first order will start at 100,000), but assessing materials and labor costs in context of your designs will be very important.

BACKGROUND

Uniforms have always been optional for Bridge pupils. Parents who have wanted their child to wear a uniform have been given rough guidelines as to the color, fabric, and cut required. Parents then brought these directions to their local tailor, whose fees are significantly lower than the cost of any store-bought uniform available in our communities. However, the work product from local tailors varies greatly in both quality and cost. By mass-producing uniforms, Bridge will be able to offer a much higher-quality product to our parents at a much lower cost, not unlike the education offering that drives our core business.
In addition to offering parents a much wanted, higher-quality commodity at a lower price, uniforms are a huge marketing opportunity for Bridge. Because most of the parents in our communities are relatively uneducated, they judge the quality of a school by the quality of its uniform. To them, uniforms represent discipline, intelligence, and potential. An aspirational uniform will make parents confident in the quality of education offered at Bridge. It will also help communities identify any children who might have gotten lost on their way to school.
Some travel, work in low-resource areas as well as to factories in Asia may be required.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EDUCATIONAL REQUIREMENTS
3+ years experience designing clothing, including conceiving concepts, creating sketches, and developing patterns and prototypes
1+ year experience designing clothing for children
Ability to work independently and think frugally, with an impeccable attention for detail
Humility to know we’re all teachers as well as students
PREFERRED EXPERIENCE AND SKILS
Current network of clothing manufacturing contacts in Asia
Experience overseeing production of clothing
Experience in low-resource communities preferred
Experience designing uniforms preferred
Design research experience a plus
Job Location(s)
Kenya
United States
Website