A fashion designer from France settles in West Wales to foster a sewing community and inspire more people to make their own clothes.
With a wealth of experience teaching people to sew and knowledge in garment construction and pattern cutting, Camille Jacquemart started Thimble Studios in 2013 to offer a variety of sewing courses. Faced with challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Camille benefitted from the Welsh Government’s Business Wales service and was matched with a volunteer business mentor, who has helped her move to online delivery and grow the business during these challenging times.
Introduction to business
After graduating in Fashion Design in France and training in Threesafour, Alexander McQueen and Fred Butler, Camille Jacquemart realised her interest in fast fashion was fast diminishing while her curiosity about how we make our clothes grew. In 2012, she came to a wool farm in Carmarthenshire, where she spent a year shepherding and learning the process from fleece to cloth. Shortly after, Thimble Studios was born, inspiring more people to make their own clothes.
Thimble Studios offers a variety of sewing courses, ranging from complete beginners to advanced dressmaking around Carmarthenshire and online.
We caught up with Camille and her mentor Gareth to find out how they’ve navigated the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic:
What challenges did you face during the Covid-19 pandemic?
Until the pandemic, I had been running dressmaking courses and retreats in person. With all my classes cancelled overnight and no date to come back, I had to completely rethink the way my business operates. It had been my ambition for some time to develop an online service so this became my focus.
At first, it was hard to get the steam my project needed. Finding equipment, the expertise, every avenue I tried was stifled under the pandemic stress. I decided not to rush and simply connect with my audience online with some daily lives until I could figure all the technicalities behind the scene. I knew I wanted to develop something long-term that would sustain me beyond the pandemic.
This is when I approached Business Wales. I got in touch to explore what support might be available.
Outcomes
I was really excited when I heard I could be matched with someone who had expertise in e-learning and video recording. My mentor Gareth has been incredibly helpful, pointing me towards the resources I needed to make my project happen. From solving technical questions to helping me consolidate my business strategy, it was the exact combination of support I needed at the time!
Future plans and ambitions
My membership has now been live for 6 months and has achieved a great retention rate. I'm looking to put systems in place to scale my online offering and grow my audience. I can now invest in some filming and streaming equipment – an outlay I couldn't imagine doing 6 months ago (I filmed all my courses with my old iPhone!). I'm excited to start implementing more live training and start to outsource some of the editing. I feel that at last, I have a business that I can scale and I'm excited to look at bringing other online products to go with the services.
Business Wales Mentoring
With over 15 years e-learning, training and NLP coaching experience, Gareth Harris runs his own e-learning business, e-Development, specialising in custom-made e-learning solutions for companies, trainers and consultants, including the design and creation of bespoke online modules and blended learning courses.
When asked about the mentoring relationship with Thimble Studios, Gareth said: “I first spoke to Camille just after lockdown started when she had decided that her face-to-face sewing classes weren’t going to be running and she had to do something else.
She had started putting content on Facebook to help people who had already started a workroom sewing course to finish. So many of the conversations we had were about technical issues, how to improve video and audio quality, how to reduce file sizes and what software to use to edit the files.
Camille has been enthusiastic from the start and always keen to learn and look at different ways of doing things. She had already joined some online classes and found a way to host her courses and sewing community.
We discussed the best ways to create the sewing course content and what it should include and again Camille was keen to develop this to be as good as possible using the equipment and resources available to her.
We had many conversations about pricing and marketing and I believe Camille has done a great job at promoting on social media and launching her products.
The success she had at the launch was fantastic and I am thrilled and proud at her success and all the hard work she has put in to build and maintain her brilliant online sewing business.
If you want to read more success stories of how Business Wales has helped other people like you to start or grow their businesses, visit https://businesswales.gov.wales/case-studies or follow @_businesswales / @_busnescymru on Twitter.