Lesley Taylor
MA, SFHEA
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Creative Industries, Architecture and Engineering
Biography
Combining her commercial and academic experience, Lesley leads Re:So, the University's student-staffed and stocked store, which gives students the opportunity to work in and develop the business, as well as to test out their products in a real-life retail store.
Lesley is a lecturer on the fashion undergraduate courses' work-based learning unit, which has close associations with Re:So, as many students choose to take on roles at the store as their final-year 100-hour placement. Modules across the faculties in the University are linked to the store, and students work with Lesley and her store team to understand the business and create product and research/marketing related outcomes, some of which are then adopted by the store in real life. The store is now heading into its next phase of development.
Lesley has presented at Interior Educators and Advance HE conferences in the UK. In 2018-19, she led an outward-facing project for Crawley Town Council as a collaboration with the Chichester College group, giving students the opportunity to work as researchers and trainers to small businesses in the town over a six month period.
Further information
Lesley worked in creative industries for over 25 years covering fashion and lifestyle visual merchandising, as well as crossing over to business-to-business and business-to-consumer in design and print. Alongside lecturing, she has run her own commercial interior styling company (Gloss Interior Styling Ltd) specialising in hotels, bars and other commercial interiors projects, since 2003.
