ABOUT ME

Meet Mrsalwaywrite; I am Ilse Vlastuin. Nice to meet you! Creativity is a major part of my life. 25+ years of experience in the fashion industry, varying from forecasting to conceptual styling and commercial design, made me the fashion-allrounder I am today.  Linguistic skills came with birth, credits for my gene pool.

STUDY & START

After my studies – MTS voor Mode en Kleding, Charles Montaigne Academy and a careerwise  pointless but highly entertaining training to be a goldsmith – I started as a forecaster at a design studio. I worked with many different brands and retailers, learned about target groups and brand positioning, visited trade shows and shopped around the globe in search of trends that I visualised/translated to fit the customers needs. A priceless style-exercise in brand-identity and how to guard it!

PRACTISE WHAT YOU PREACH

After the above mentioned period at the forecasting and advising ‘base’ of the fashion industry I changed places to the opposite side of the table; developing collection concepts for brands and private labels and – classic case of ‘practise what you preach’ – designing fashion garments.

A WALKING TALKING FASHION LIBRARY

Developing collection concepts, sourcing fabrics and yarns in the Far East and Turkey, designing (mainly ladies-) garments, sample follow-up; you name it, I did it. Resulting in a solid expertise on design, culture & (fashion-)history ánd a thorough knowledge of fabrics, washes and finishes. I am a walking, talking fashion library. To the devil with false modesty :)

STORYTELLING IN WORDS AND IMAGES

Besides developing collections, I also took care of the collection handovers; talking the sales representatives through Powerpoint presentations in which I linked actual trends and catwalk-novelties to the own collections, for the purpose of inspiring  and enhancing sales results. Storytelling in words and images! Writing content for brochures, press releases and social media was the logical next step – fed by the enormous pleasure I get from linguistics, creatively ‘juggling’ with words and cracking puns. Last mentioned flaw inflicted the name ‘Mrsalwayswrite’. Nowadays I am a freelance storyteller. In native Dutch as well as solid English.

But other than Mrsalwayswrite I am also just Ilse. Committed, motivated, professional. Mild character, strong work ethos. And never short of humour :)

*Update; the latest addition to my study was a training on copywriting techniques. At the time of my birth SEO, AIDA and the structural set-up of email-newsletters weren’t available for brewing gene pools.