Decluttering, the Hindmarch way
British designer Anya Hindmarch excels at organisation, writes Aimee Farrell
THE whitewashed, warren-like interior of a former brewery in London now serves as the headquarters of Anya Hindmarch, the design force behind the global accessories and clothing company that bears her name.
Around the space are reminders of the witticisms that have, over more than 30 years, secured her place as British fashion’s merrymaker.
Her top shelves are stacked with the giant cereal boxes that inspired her Corn Flake clutch bags and Tony the Tiger totes for fall 2014; on a table behind her desk is a giant glass vase filled with smiley balls that hark back to her perennially popular collection of emoji-shaped leather accessory stickers. “It’s creative clutter,” she says, smiling. “I like a bit of artful disarray.”
Elsewhere, things are more pristine. What you won’t find anywhere in these offices are Post-it Notes (“they feel disorganised”), coats on the backs of chairs or stuff stacked up on the floors.
“I’m a bit of a tidy freak,” says Hindmarch, who instigates regular “purge and pizza” days when her staff clear the chaos from their work spaces.
“It’s when it all silts up that it gets disgusting. I’m not good at silt,” she says.
With 280 personnel, some 30 stores worldwide, and five children at home, it’s no surprise that for Hindmarch, keeping her space spick-and-span is very much about maintaining control.
“Brains are brilliant at having ideas but not holding them, so having systems in place is the key to creativity for me,” she says. “I have my best ideas at a clean table.”
Here, she shares some of her methodology for banishing the clutter.
BE SENTIMENTAL BUT SYSTEMATIC
“I’m a great believer in keeping special things, but I don’t want piles and piles of stuff on my desk or bedside table,” says Hindmarch, who stows standout invitations, special letters (including ones with her company’s first letterhead) and mementos in box files of “memory drawers” that are dated by year. “I want to have all those memories easily accessible so I can find them again.” DIGITISE PHOTO BOXES THAT ARE TOO BULKY Last year, in an effort to regain cupboard space in the house she shares with her five children —“If you’re not careful, they treat your house like a storage unit,” she says — Hindmarch decided to digitise her entire life’s photographs.
“I went to the scanners with 40 boxes of prints and came back with a tiny memory stick,” says Hindmarch, who kept and framed anything special or hand printed but burnt the rest. “Sometimes you have to take that really brave decision.” Now that her (very well backed-up) photo archive is searchable by place or person on her iPad, she views her pictures more than ever before.
LABEL, LABEL, LABEL
When her brother gave her a label maker as a tongue-in-cheek gift one Christmas, little did he know that it would revolutionise her life.
The first thing Hindmarch labelled at home was her “present cupboard”, a dedicated space that’s stocked with instantly accessible gifts. “So often you have to buy something again just because you can’t find it,” she says.
“It sounds simple, but if you keep light bulbs with light bulbs you’ll always know where things are. It’s efficient — and it means you don’t waste time.” Now, she labels everything in sight — even the label maker itself.
MAKE PRE-PACKABLE KITS
The labelling gadget went on to inspire her best-selling “Labelled” collection of leather pouches and loose pockets for specific tasks, such as baby changing kits and lunchboxes. In preparation for frequent trips between her global stores, Hindmarch keeps an armoury of labelled kits pre-packed at home. There’s “Cables and Chargers”, loaded with universal and laptop chargers; “Sunscreens”; a monster-embossed transparent “In-Flight” case with sleeping pills, headphones, lip balm, mini toothpaste, deodorant and Sisley Rose face masks; and even currency-specific wallets with loose change from her travels.
“It means that when I’m going on a trip I can just grab them and I know I’ll have everything I need,” she says. “I’m When it comes to wardrobe streamlining, Hindmarch follows the advice of the stylist and personal shopper Lima O’Donnell.
She sets up a clothing rack in her room and fills it with all the clothes that she’s worn over the past three weeks.
Next, she removes all the items that she hasn’t worn because they need mending and puts them in a pile for the tailor. Then, she takes out the items that she never wears because she has nothing to pair them with and decides whether or not they’re worth keeping.
Next comes the purging. She sifts through items on a case-by-case basis, deciding what to ditch.
“Making these decisions can weigh you down,” she says. “But in the end, the joy of not having stuff can pretty much supersede the joy of having it.”
For space-saving purposes, she packs away half her clothes each season. Though she stops short of wardrobe colour-coding, she cannily divides navy from black in her closet to bypass the time-consuming pro- cess of discerning between the two in the early morning half-light.
SAVE YOUR CALENDAR
While her schedule is kept on a shared Outlook diary, Hindmarch still steadfastly believes in the power of the paper record.
Not only does she print off and ring-bind her digital diary at the end of every year, she writes a personal diary of her activities every night — a tradition she’s inherited from her husband’s side of the family.
“Even though I sometimes resent doing it when I’m exhausted before going to bed,” she says. “It’s so lovely to have a log of where you’ve been and who you’ve met to look back on.”
BE FORENSIC IN YOUR TO-DO LISTS
Day to day, Hindmarch uses a single sheet of thick A5-size paper, which she slips in her notebook like a page marker.
Handwritten in pencil, and carefully sectioned off by project — from her current collection to her forthcoming London Fashion Week presentation — it includes everything she needs to get done that week. “If things get badly busy,” she says. “I’ll also make an urgent list of all the things I need to do in the next few hours.”
Sharing intel that she’s gleaned from Allen, she says it can be helpful to make your lists location specific: things you can do at your desk, calls you can make while you’re on the move, shopping to be done in a particular place. The key is to think about the steps you need to move the project from the page and into action.
“I have my father’s 80th birthday party coming up, so rather than just writing that on my list and not doing anything about it, I’ll think through to the next action — in this case, it’s to call my sister. Once you actually start doing things, you can get it done quite quickly.
Brains are brilliant at having ideas but not holding them, so having systems in place is the key to creativity for me. Anya Hindmarch, British designer not stressing out that I’ll forget things.” DIVIDE YOUR CLOSET, UNFLINCHINGLY