Over the past few weeks, our group has been working on our project ‘Perfectly Imperfect Co’. Perfectly Imperfect Co designs makeup pouches that encourage body positivity. As a group, we chose this idea because we all have an interest in beauty products and have a collective mindset that all bodies are beautiful bodies. Our aim is to encourage young girls to feel happy when they look in the mirror. We want to use our products as a tool for feminism and activism and help women feel engaged in the revolution of body positivity.

In order to create these bags, we utilised AI technology. Firstly, we wanted to have inspirational quotes on the bags so we asked ChatGBT to generate some uplifting messages for us. Next, to make our makeup pouches look more aesthetically pleasing we decided to add some graphics. To do this we typed in some keywords into MidJourney about how we wanted the design to look and it created some options for us to choose from. We also gathered inspiration for our designs from Pinterest and from brands that create similar products such as Cotton on.

Now that we had generated what we were going to put on our makeup pouches we had to figure out how we were going to make them. The group originally wanted to use the embroidery machine, however due to my previous experience I knew that would not work as we can not put our own designs through the machine. So we decided to try something none of us had tried before, which is sublimation printing. 

As we had never used the sublimation printer and heat press before, we had to conduct some research to understand how it works and what materials we could use. After we conducted our initial research we ordered our materials and finalised our designs so that we could start making our product. By putting design thinking into practice we were able to be creative in our development process. By utilising this framework we were able to address challenges by breaking up the process into key components such as empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test which allowed us to be efficient during the development of this project. 

Once our product arrived we started producing them straight away, although this took a long time as we had to connect to the sublimation printer, as well as do test prints to make sure the size of our designs were correct. As we were making our makeup pouches we realised they needed something else to make them even more unique so we designed our own tags to go on the pouches. To make the tags we opted to use the laser cutter, however, we did face some challenges. The first trials of our design resulted in the outcomes being the wrong size, although we managed to fix it on our third attempt. By that point we had run out of time so we ordered more material with the hopes to make more tags, unfortunately, our material still has not arrived so we are unable to finish our bag tags. 

The final step for our project was creating an online presence. Our group decided the best way to reach our target audience was through TikTok and Instagram. I created the TikTok and Instagram profiles while Andrea created the content for me to upload. I also created a website site which allows people to view all our products and learn more about our brand.

Finally, It is highly important that we reflect on our work so that we move away from routine thinking towards reflective action. Upon reflection the development of this project provided many key learning experiences, including how to use the equipment in the maker studio. Moving forward we can continue to improve our product by brainstorming ways to make it more sustainable as well as evaluating ways we can differentiate our product and expand our target audience.

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Our Group Pitch: