Lead Service Designer – Corporate Banking
I look like someone not to be messed with, and I'll take it!
When I started working with Lilian just as she was stepping up into a bigger leadership role, managing a team and carrying a lot more weight in a very corporate banking environment. Lilian is a service designer by trade, which means she’s naturally creative, but she was suddenly being asked to hold her own in rooms full of senior stakeholders, directors and executives, and she wanted her presence to say something that her job title alone wasn’t quite managing on its own.
What stood out from the start was that Lilian already had instincts. She knew the kind of styles, cuts and details she was drawn to, she just hadn’t had the chance to properly name them or build them into something she could rely on every single day. So rather than putting her in a generic corporate uniform, we worked with what was already there and sharpened it, so that everything in Lilian’s wardrobe started to say expertise, creativity and authority, with a bit of an edge that felt completely her. That identity first approach mattered because Lilian didn’t need to look like everyone else in the room to be taken seriously, she needed to look unmistakably like herself, and like someone who belonged exactly where she was.
Challenges
On paper, this could look like a straightforward “help a woman in banking dress with more confidence” brief, but the real challenge sat somewhere deeper than that. Lilian was walking into meetings as an additional invitee, often the only woman and often the only creative in a room of senior figures, and even though she was more than capable, she was constantly working against imposter syndrome and a nagging feeling that she had to overwork just to prove she deserved to be there.
The tension she was really navigating was between being seen as a creative, someone who designs and imagines, and being recognised as someone with genuine authority and expertise, someone whose voice carried weight in the room rather than someone who was simply there to observe. Lilian shared that people would sometimes assume, in those bigger meetings, that she was there to take notes rather than to lead. That’s a very specific and very telling thing to have to push back against, quietly, again and again, while also trying to do the job itself. So the work wasn’t really about clothes for their own sake, it was about closing the gap between how capable Lilian already was and how instantly that capability read to the people around her.
Results & wins
- Walks into meetings with directors and executives and is now recognised as someone leading the discussion, not taking the notes
- Gained the confidence to go after bigger opportunities and recognition within her role
- Holds the floor more confidently with senior stakeholders, even when she’s the extra invitee in the room
- Cut the daily decision fatigue of getting dressed, since her wardrobe now works together effortlessly and everything mixes and matches with ease
- Colleagues and superiors have noticeably changed how they perceive her since the transformation
- Describes her new style as feeling like armour, and has been told more than once that she looks like someone not to be messed with
In her own words:
- “I think it’s helped me to stand out in rooms with more senior stakeholders and hold the floor more confidently, meaning I’ve mixed with directors and executives and gotten exposure for work, this is especially helpful in cases where I’ve been an extra invitee to a meeting.”
- “Since my wardrobe has a lot of leather and metal I feel like I’m wearing armour. I’ve been told a few times I look like someone not to be messed with! I’ll take it.”
Lilian also left this recommendation, which sums up the deeper shift beautifully: