Designers usually keep their fabric vendors secret from other designers because its part of our success to find the perfect fabric for our collections. She helped pass my sketches to the technical team. She helped take photos of each finished new style. I was really grateful to be working with her because she seemed so intuitive to what I’d need to keep the design room flow. Then one day my clothing label salesman got off on the wrong floor in our fashion showroom building. She saw a brand new showroom with my assistant’s name in a fresh, huge sign. Nearly identical samples were hanging on the racks. Same fabrics, same styles I had designed for a collection that was just making its debut. As soon as I hung up the phone with the sales rep I called the assistant into my office. She had been using the assistant job to gather vendor and plagiarize style info for her own new label. She didn’t see this as unethical and also illegal since she signed a privacy agreement on her first day.
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