Meet Ruth Nijsten

I was a stay at home mum living in Asia following my husbands expat career. A background in Fashion design, worked the Fashion industry in Europe before we moved but was not allowed to work on several of our posting. Did teaching on and off but my heart was not in it. During my work as a fashion designer years ago I had always really enjoyed picking the prints for the collections and on a few occasions had designed overall prints for sleepwear. 

With the children growing up I wanted something for myself and had joined flourish so when the opportunity came to join Immersion it was clear to me; 

Immersion was my present to me, an investment in my personal future. 

I dived into the course, enjoyed the lessons, made lots of patterns, despite knowing the basics of illustrator learned an incredible amount of new things. Keyboard shortcuts, workflows, how to build patterns, collection building to name a few. Had an amazing supportive Peergroup, enjoyed the life calls, the opportunities to get all my questions answered, really enjoyed the complete course.

After finishing I focused on getting my portfolio ready and sold several prints to a local company. I was lucky to get acces to immersion 2021 as well and the second time round I focused more on the business part lessons of the course, but went over all lessons again and picked up news things I had missed the year before.

Confidence up and ready to pitch . Fast forward to now ;

I have sold prints for scarfs and had several shown on “the Big Stage” during Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, merchandise coming out in March this year with my prints on it for WWF Singapore and Singapore Zoo, licensed prints for notebooks, wrapping paper and paper bags. Prints in Canon Netherlands Wallpaperbook, meaning they are available on many different kinds of wallpaper and I get commission from every sale made, have sold prints for rugs and blankets for a resort and several new collaborations in the pipe line.

What ‘s next? I ‘ll be doing more pitching coming months, will be taking part in Print Source Virtual Show and hoping to bring my own line of shirt dresses with of coarse my own prints on them onto the market.