Assistant Footwear Designer - Womenswear Non Clothing
Next · Leicester
Working Pattern: Typically 5 days in the office with flexible core hours between 8am-6pm
The Role
As an Assistant Footwear Designer for the Laura Ashley & Next Main Range, you will play a vital role in bringing high fashion, trend driven designs to life across our footwear and accessories ranges. Working closely with our established womenswear non clothing team at Next, you’ll help design commercial, elevated ranges that align with brand identities while delivering real market appeal.
You will collaborate daily with designers, buyers, merchandisers, technologists, sourcing teams, and offshore suppliers. Whether you're turning around fast paced design briefs or supporting major seasonal collections, you’ll help ensure our products are on trend, high quality, and hit strict commercial price points.
What You’ll Take On
- Design Support & Range Creation: Assist in designing and developing compelling footwear ranges across womenswear portfolios.
- Fast Paced Brief Execution: Respond quickly to design briefs, delivering fast turnaround, high-quality CADs and visual concepts without compromising on creativity.
- Trend Research & Translation: Identify key global trends and translate them into commercially viable, elevated products tailored to our target customer.
- Tech Packs & Supplier Briefing: Create detailed, accurate tech packs and directly brief factories and offshore manufacturers to ensure design vision becomes physical sample reality.
- Costing & Value Engineering: Design within specific price point guidelines while maintaining the quality, style, and finish expected of our brands.
- Cross Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with buyers, merchandisers, technologists, and suppliers to keep product development on schedule and to exact specifications.
- Project & Range Support: Balance day to day main range development alongside fast turnaround project based capsule collections.
What You’ll Bring
- Relevant Design Experience: Proven experience designing footwear, ideally womenswear or older girls footwear experience
- Technical Knowledge: Hands on experience creating technical packs, specification sheets, and briefing offshore suppliers/manufacturers.
- Software Expertise: Advanced proficiency in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for creating professional CADs, renders, and trend boards.
- Commercial Eye: Strong trend forecasting skills paired with an understanding of commercial price structures and high street manufacturing.
- Collaborative Mindset: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build strong working relationships across internal teams and factory partners.
- Adaptability & Organisation: High level of organisation with the ability to manage multiple priorities, work efficiently under tight deadlines, and thrive in a fast paced retail environment.
- Industry Background: Previous experience working within a retail brand or supplier environment is highly advantageous.
Portfolios
To help us get a feel for your style, please attach a digital portfolio to your application. We are looking for work that demonstrates a sharp eye for the future of Footwear, how your ideas can be commercially viable for NEXT, and showcases your direct design and CAD work. To help you put your best foot forward, we’ve put together a few top tips on what makes a portfolio stand out to our team.
Applications without a portfolio will not be considered.
Sponsorship
Candidates wishing to apply who would require sponsorship for this role will be required to meet the Home Office sponsorship requirements. For further information please see: https://www.gov.uk/skilled-worker-visa.
We encourage early applications for our roles, as our recruitment process begins as soon as the role is advertised. If we successfully fill the position, this advert may close earlier than planned.
#LI-Onsite
You know Next, but did you know we’re a FTSE-100 retail company employing over 44,000 people across the Next group. We’re the UK’s 2nd largest fashion retailer and for Kidswear we’re the market leader. At the last count we have over 450 stores, plus the Next Online and it’s now possible to buy on-line from over 80 countries around the world! So we’ve gone global! Our Womenswear Non Clothing Team are looking for an Assistant Footwear Designer to design for Laura Ashley & Next Main Range Womenswear Footwear!