5 Minutes with... Sam Giles

Our final LinkedIn Q&A series of 2024 focuses on Mondottica Group’s creative side.

We grab five minutes with Sam Giles, Mondottica Group Creative Director, to talk everything design, managing Mondottica Group’s premium brand portfolio creatively and looking forward to 2025.

As Creative Director at Mondottica Group, what does your role encompass?

I oversee everything creative within the business for our customers, internally and externally, that isn’t the design of the product. I have been in my current role as Creative Director at Mondottica Group for over five years.

Can you bring us up-to-speed on what you have been working on?

We are in the middle of designing the next MIDO trade show – 8-10 February – and that involves the pop-up for this year, designing the stand and running the production. We do all of the specifications, materials and planning for a big project like this.

We have also tied up six of our in-house brand partner photo shoots with our renowned studio. Our team has done everything from the concept stage to moodboards, working with the our brands to make sure that we’re all aligned and the direction we’ve suggested works for them.

We first used the studio in Manchester with our brand partner Reebok for AW24, back in May, and it went so smoothly. It was a really great experience and I would like to recognise their producer, Gaby Bradshaw, for being an absolute G, pulling all of the teams together and the photographer, Ben Wedderburn, who’s worked with us on all of our brand photo shoots subsequently. They’re a dream team and make it a truly pleasurable experience.

You recently shot a substantial number of Mondottica Group’s brand partner SS25 eyewear campaigns, can you share more details?

We have shot and approved Reebok eyewear SS25 and AllSaints eyewear SS25. As well as all the new SS25 eyewear campaigns for Karen Millen, Ted Baker, Ted Baker Kids and Jaguar, for our partner Menrad.

What is it like working with Mondottica Group’s extensive portfolio of fashion brand partners?

It is wonderful and, like Forrest Gump said, ‘you never know what you’re going to get!” They are all different and have strong identities. For example, we’re currently working on the Vivienne Westwood retouch and you are guaranteed to get a wonderful shoot from Vivienne Westwood because they know what they’re doing and they have a sense of themselves. Their business feels like it’s in continual ascension.

We’re a licensed source and look to our brand partners for direction and support on how we represent their image in the eyewear category. I’m the creative director, but I don’t set the creative pace, the brand sets the pace, and we work within it, so it’s very much an assimilation of what the brand is doing and understanding what they require is key to my role.

Our communication channels are strong, so when the brand says, “I’m doing next season like this”, we get a lead on it, so we can respond accordingly.

Creatively, what are you most excited about moving forward into 2025?

I’m excited about working more closely with our marketing team, because what they bring to our process is a link between our commercial side of the business, which is incredibly important, and join the dots between creative by understanding briefs and getting ahead of what our customers need.

Brand wise, it will be great to be involved more in the next round of launches for florence by mills in 2025.

We are a smaller team of creatives who support 15 brands and I’m so proud because the output the team produces is insane. What we do is world-class such as virtual reality tap-to-try and renders of products that can then be augmented onto people’s faces via in app software on mobile devices.

Mondottica Group has an incredible, London-based design team making fantastic products. I like to think that we’re an additional accoutrement that brings an effective and creative flavour to the eyewear industry that is absent in other eyewear companies.

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