Starting a new career is scary, and it can be easy to underestimate what you bring to the table when you do. In this interview, Heidi helps new freelance patternmaker Vanessa dissect Vanessa’s current outreach approach and strategize how to receive more email responses, starting without experience, what her pay rate should be, how Upwork can help grow her business, and create a plan of action.
Having had a career in science and technology, both as an employee and running her own business, Vanessa wanted a change and began retraining in fashion design. She’s coming to the end of her studies and has started doing small projects for small start up brands, but she wants more to sustain her creatively, professionally and financially! She really loves surface pattern design and garment pattern making as they relate back to her other passions which are geometry and mathematics. She’s married to Stuart with two children (Heidi, 15 and Ivan, 18) and a cat called Fizzy. They live in Scotland.