Dear Team at Designer Brands, 
 
Every once in a while, you come across a job description that not only matches your love for fashion but is also ideally suited to your design interests, skills and abilities. 
 
My name is Andrea Hull and I am an Integrated Retail Designer and Art Director with 10 years’ retail advertising experience. I was delighted to read about the senior Graphic Designer position you have available at Designer Brands as it seamlessly combines my passion for building a brand and creating high-quality design with my obsession with fashion. I have extensive retail fashion experience and count some of South Africa’s leading fashion brands among my former clients. These brands cover a wide spectrum and include men, women and children’s clothing and accessories.
 
My professional experience covers trend research, developing original ideas, designing for both digital, print and in-store, facilitating creative direction, planning rollouts, shooting products and overseeing the creative process from start to finish. Creating and maintaining a consistent look and feel across every element is always a priority.
 
I thrive in a fast pace, deadline-driven working environments that requires quick, effective and on-point turnarounds, and relish the opportunity to work on multiple projects at once. I’m allergic to complacency and love projects that challenge and stimulate me. Working in teams with people with different skill sets in addition to mentoring junior team members so we all come together to create successful campaigns and consistent, engaging brand experiences, offers me exactly the kind of stimulation I love. In every aspect of my work, I seek to drive meaningful engagement and improve brand loyalty through on-strategy, beautiful, trend-led design.
 
In my years in the industry, I have been part of both in-house marketing teams and have worked on a consultancy basis for top advertising agencies that range from the large and multinational to the small and boutique. I particularly enjoyed working for Markham, a men’s clothing brand (330 stores) that forms part of The Foschini Group, a giant retail group of 3,328 stores across 34 countries. Fashion is a sector to which I have naturally turned my attention over the years, and my attached résumé offers many additional examples of this experience.
 
I have been self-employed for the last four years and, in the process, have refined my adaptability to work well in any team and have nurtured a strong collaborative attitude. I can be relied upon to deliver to brief and on deadline, and am a stickler for detail. Almost all of the projects I’ve worked on have had a strong digital component, and have included website and email marketing, online display banner ads and branded social media content that fits both the campaign concept and overall business strategy. I believe that having a firm understanding of the ever-changing retail clothing sector, fashion industry, design world and their attending omnichannel opportunities is essential if you are to create effective, targeted marketing collateral. As a result, I keep a finger on these multiple pulses every day.