Pinterest & Me - driving traffic for my Etsy shop

My name is Charlie and I’m a British fashion designer specializing in sewn fabric hats that I design, make and sell directly from my rural French home and studio, ‘ZUTusine.’ We’re situated in the lovely, densely forested mountains of central France. After a degree in painting, I progressed to a Masters in Fashion at Central Saint Martins, London specializing in printed textiles and graduating in 1992. I was Charlie Derbyshire then, with a catwalk show at London Fashion week alongside my more famous classmates Alexander McQueen and Wakako Kishimoto. 

After several years working as a freelance print designer and design-craft exhibition curator, I moved to France in 2004 with my furniture-making husband, David Arnold, and my 3 young children. We purchased a beautiful, but derelict 1920’s hydro-electric station that had the perfect potential to be a family home with studios for our craft businesses. I have always worked hard on all my design projects and enjoyed being challenged by working on collaborative exhibitions, but running my own business has been a life-saver for me. It has brought in the money I needed to properly care for my family here in France—especially when my husband became ill in 2015. He had two heart attacks: one in 2015 and another in the Spring of 2018. I realized then that I had to step up and earn a living for all of us, but I needed to be at home as well in order to look after everyone.

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