Lara Presber dishes on developing her ‘signature’ style
Produced by Roxana Secara
“You can definitely say it’s a bit of an addiction,” says Lara Presber in her studio.
While she shares the space with two interior designers, it’s a perfect resemblance of her passions: a mix between interior design and architectural elements surrounded by mannequins, materials and sketches of dresses.
Presber originally went to school for architecture and pursued a career in the field.
After 10 years as an architect, she moved to Milan to study fashion design.
“I felt like I needed to make things,” she says.
Presber remained in the architectural world following her move back to Calgary, while starting up a career in fashion.
Always inspired by her surroundings, she began to incorporate architecture and buildings into her collections.
“It became my signature,” she says.
Although it wasn’t easy to keep both dreams afloat, Presber has finally found a sales strategy that does make it possible.
Crowd-pricing strategy
Presber’s new technique thrives on the saying, “building your wardrobe one piece at a time.”
She offers one to two pieces for one month, instead of selling numerous pieces from her collection. This allows her to slowly release items and gives the shopper the unique experience to buy straight from the designer.
There are perks: as the quantity of the item sold increases, the price decreases.
“It took about five years to find something that worked best for me,” she says of the crowd-pricing strategy.
Presber says that because she has so many pieces designed and only puts out one per month, she can now “coast a little” and keep busy with architecture projects as well.
When asked whether she considers herself more of an architect or a fashion designer, she says, “I like to think of myself as a designer with different clients, be it residential, commercial, or fashion.”
rsecara@cjournal.ca
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
We would love for you to republish our student work!
Just scroll down to copy and paste the code of our article into your CMS. The codes for images, graphics and other embeddable elements may not transfer exactly as they appear on our site. It's free! We only ask that you follow some simple guidelines when doing so:-
You've gotta credit us. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Calgary Journal.” At the top of the story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by the Calgary Journal.”
-
If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of the original story on calgaryjournal.ca.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Abbotsford, B.C.” to “Abbotsford” or “here.”)
-
You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. Please contact managing damclean@mtroyal.ca for more information.
-
Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent way to contact you.
-
If you share the story on social media, we’d appreciate a shout-out @CalgaryJournal (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram)
- If we send a request to change or remove Calgary Journal content on your site, you must agree to do so immediately.
This policy was adapted from ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.
If you have any other questions, contact our managing editor Archie McLean at damclean@mtroyal.ca