5 Reasons to join Ladies, Wine & Design chapter of your city

A year pass since I joined Ladies, Wine & Design Valencia, and I have to tell you that it is my most satisfying job I ever had, and I don’t get paid for it.

1. Work with other types of designers/creative

How many times could you work with a team of real multidisciplinary designers? I’m working for five years in a tech environment where the words like a retrospective, daily, sprints, and software like Slack, Jira and Trello are my everyday tools. So working with graphic designers, fashion designers, digital designers, copies, and influencers are mind-blowing!

You will know more types of methodologies to work in remote.

We moved through agile in September, and we operate entirely on the remote mode even without knowing each other. But we’re still looking for a balance from agile to chaos and trying to understand how is the best way to work. We want to do our method as easy as we can due to we have a different type of creatives and members who never use Trello before.

Our current method? - A monthly meeting in person or by Skype call. - A sheet in google sheets with the role for this month of each member. - Trello task to be done by the month (We use Kanban method). - Slack, well… this is only for a few of us, not everybody likes it, so we use Whatsapp to fast messages.

2. Get involved in some differents event typologies

In Ladies, Wine & Design Valencia chapter, we did conferences, Pechakuchas, creative speed dating, portfolio reviews and more are coming!

In each event, you can know one of the best professionals in our city, talk with them and have a quick chat. You also could ask help for every matter of our creative job, and they are super happy to help or give us advice. You will be part of the event so you probably will be working in something meanwhile, but trust me, you will enjoy it anyway.

And, also, I made friends on the Organization!

3. Grow as professional and learn other skills you’re not able to do in your current fulltime job.

We, in valencia, are teamwork switching between current tasks every month. I mean one month you are in charge of Social Media, another you have to create the event, talk with the speakers, suppliers, do de graphics… Well, everything you can imagine of the needs of an event running by some agency (but in your free time).

So I have the chance to speak in front of more than 130 people. I have to confess that it was better than I expected!

What kind of task I did this year? Well, I prepared some events, do the social media, newsletters, create an event on Eventbrite, update the Ladies, Wine & Design site, talk with speakers, wine sponsors, printing company, make some copies, sent MailChimp Campaign, a lot of legal stuff, and also making a campaign about PRIDE (I’m super proud of it).

A lot of things, huh?

4. Learn and test how to speak in public

As I said before, I talk in front of 140 crowds and a smaller one. And I’m super afraid of talking in public. So for me, it is a challenge. Last time I was super nervous, so I decided to say it when I started to speak, I feel better, but also forgot the name of one of the speakers, and now what? Nothing happened. I corrected myself and nothing more.

Do I have to improve it? Yes! But I want the opportunity to talk again and try it again. So I can tell you one thing, next time would be better.

5. Empower women

And, for sure: EMPOWERING ANOTHER.

Valencia had a lack of female speakers for some reasons. There is only 11% of the head of creative business although there is more than 57% of women studying this on the University and School of arts and only the 33% of the workers on design are women in Valencia (Spain)*.

The numbers say it all: 70% of design students are women, but only 5–11% of creative director positions are held by women. Only 0.1% of creative agencies are women-owned. POINT. ONE. PERCENT.**

So we need to encourage ourselves as much as we can, talk about the problem and get the men involved!

* This data is from ACDV. Asociación de diseñadores de la Comunitad Valenciana.

** Data providen by AndWalsh.

Do you want to join the nearest chapter? Or create yours?

Join Your Local Chapter

Check it out to see if you have a local LW&D chapter in your city on the Ladies, Wine & Design site. If you do, make sure to attend an event and ask the hosts if you can assist them in any way!

Start a Local Chapter

If your city doesn’t have a local chapter and you want to be a host, email to LW&D team at [email protected] and we’ll get you started!

Good Luck!

And Enjoy our events.