Students gain unique insight into making it in the fashion industry

Students from BA (Hons) Fashion Media and BA (Hons) Beauty Promotion recently had the opportunity to receive a virtual guest lecture from Camilla Craven, former Global Director of PR and Advocacy at world-renowned beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury.

Camilla is now Brand Communications Director for luxury lifestyle brand VASHI, and joined students to talk through her extensive experience in the world of public relations and communications.

During her talk Camilla explained how she got started in the industry, initially studying history at university, she graduated and began to gain work experience in a variety of industries including beauty, fashion, lifestyle and food and drink. This experience she explained, was how she gained her entry level role of Junior Account Executive at communications agency Halpern. Over the next six years, Camilla worked her way up to the position of Associate Director– and puts her success down to her hard work, passion, dedication and determination.

Camilla then made the decision to work in-house, and sought out a position at Benefit Cosmetics as Head of PR and Events, after one year she was then headhunted by the team at Charlotte Tilbury who offered her a position as Global Head of PR.

In her role at Tilbury, Camilla explains her greatest moments were launching the brand into 60 new countries and travelling the world. Camilla also shared that upon starting at the brand, there were 100 members of staff, and on leaving there were over 1,200 – showing the success and fast growth of the brand and products.

To finish the lecture, Camilla shared her advice for making your CV stand out, explaining candidates must show who they are and their personality throughout, as well as making nods towards brands you admire.

Student, Georgia Hollis said of the lecture “Camilla is so inspiring, and I thoroughly enjoyed her talk. She provided some great tips on how to stand out when applying for jobs in the industry, how to make a press release exciting and how to launch a brand into new markets. I have learned so much from her and will 100% be looking out for any jobs she advertises in the future! I love that our course has such amazing guest speakers every week.”