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Difuzed’s New Creative Director; Sara Allwood as being the first female director of the company will bring even more creativity to the licensing world.

Sara Allwood
Sara Allwood – Creative Director at Difuzed

Difuzed has recently hired its first ever female director to head the marketing and design departments which have been the key units for the company’s success.  Sara has a diverse background in Design and marketing for the past 18 years, within the High street Retail and Luxury markets. Having worked for Retail giant C&A Europe in Germany for the past 8 years at management level, Sara brings her creative and strategic mindset to take Difuzed to the next level.

Sara will be Directing the Design and Marketing departments within Difuzed, building Difuzed marketing strategies in line with what’s needed for the B2B and upcoming B2C platforms, driving exciting new collaborations for licensing and driving change through innovation on design.

We spoke with Sara about her new role, new trends in fashion industry and women empowerment.

  • You are the first female director in DIFUZED. What are your thoughts about this?

If you look at the licensing business, it’s fairly male-dominated as well, so it’s great for me to play with the big boys!

I have definitely experienced at times people who are hiring for management positions are not as open to hiring females,  especially mothers, as they would be to people without children – particularly in the fashion industry – but certainly at DIFUZED that was never an issue for our CEO!

  • Can you tell us a bit about your background?

I have been working in the fashion industry for around 18 years. I started off after I graduated on the supplier area, which was GREAT grounding for me as a designer to really understand how to make a garment, I then moved to retail. I predominantly worked in the UK and then in the US market, in Europe also, within the design and Marketing areas.  I have had an all-round good grounding, working across many product categories from high street to luxury, and travelled the world with my job which has been great!

  • What is really important for a female leader?

I think you have to definitely be a STRONG woman to be able to play with the men in the world. It’s so important for companies to hire female leaders more, just to show how awesome female leaders really ARE! For DIFUZED to embrace that is just a clear message to the outside world that we are changing internally, as well as externally. So it’s exciting!

  • What or who inspires you in the fashion industry?

It’s music, it’s films, the economic state, we are in and out of lockdowns so we are definitely entering a protective phase and next year we will want to carry this on, but on the other side we will want to bring joy back into our lives as well. Everything around us we can draw inspiration from.  The environment that we are living in and what’s going on in the world has a massive influence. New art, graffiti is a really hot topic right now as well as street art and digital landscape art.

As far as who has inspired me the most throughout my life and continues to inspire me is definitely my mum! She is a strong woman. She is a single mum, kicked-ass through everything and mentally and emotionally provided me and my brother with everything.  I think that way of mentoring and nurturing has made me the female leader I am today!

  • What’s exciting about what you do at DIFUZED?

Well you’re going to see a lot more sustainable collections from DIFUZED which will be important, we have so many exciting new projects coming through for next year, so you really need to watch this space! We are also working on some great collaborations that will propel licensing into a new arena.

We definitely want to see DIFUZED being more design-led than it is now. I want to SHOUT how great we are! how great the people are in the business and the great things we’re doing because I enjoy working with creative minds and what I want to say to everybody out there is that we are not just licensing, we are FASHION!

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