ITS 2014 Presenting & Scouting Tour. Reporting Our yearly trip to schools around the world!

We have been travelling since the very first edition to spread the word about International Talent Support and when we say all over the world we really mean it: we’ve done presentations from Japan to India, Cuba, South America, North America, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Slovenia, Austria, Italy, The Netherlands…we’ve almost lost count of all the places we’ve been to in 13 years of ITS.

What we do is basically ask schools to provide us with a large room, a video projector connected to a computer and a sound system. In front of a wide audience of students we tell everything there is to know about International Talent Support, to clear out all the doubts of those who still do not know what it is.
This year we decided to hugely expand our Presenting Tour, to provide a lot more students than usual with all the information and underline even more why it is important for them to enrol. It brought us to do presentations in 20 different countries, going from Lebanon to Finland, Canada, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic… how did we do that? The ITS FAMILY was essential.

We asked former finalists from every corner of the globe to become official Ambassadors and go present ITS in schools for us. We didn’t just want them to talk about ITS, we also wanted them to tell the students their own personal experience.
The schools involved were terribly excited by this initiative and they enthusiastically offered their support to our finalists for their presentations, providing them with all of the necessary tools. We would like to thank each and every one of our ITS Ambassadors for investing their time in helping us out.
Without them it would have been unthinkable to cover so many schools across the world. Seeing them support us after we supported them gave us real joy:

Isabella Kuru, ITS 2012 Finalist, for her presentation at ESMOD Munich in Germany
Larisza Pasztircsak, ITS TEN Finalist, for her presentation at MOME MOholy-Nagy Muveszeti Egyetem in Budapest, Hungar
Tamar Areshidze, ITS 2012 Finalist, for her presentation at Tbilisi Academy of Arts in Georgia
Veronika Kallaur, ITS 2012 Finalist, for her presentation at the Institute of Modern Knowledge in Minsk, Belarus
Yoshikazu Yamagata, ITS THREE Finalist, for his presentation at Coconogacco in Tokyo and at Cocoa in Fukuoka, both in Japan
Paula Cheng, ITS 2013 Finalist, for her presentation at Parsons, The New School for Design in New York, USA

Arnaud Zill, ITS TEN Finalist, for his presentation at HEAD – Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva, Switzerland
Zuzana Serbak, ITS TEN Finalist, for her presentation at UMPRUM in Prague, Czech Republic
Taro Horiuchi, ITS SIX Finalist, for his presentation at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, Japan
Tabitha Osler, ITS TEN Finalist, for her presentation at George Brown College in Toronto, Canada
Rayya Valerie Morcos, ITS 2013 Finalist, for her presentation at ESMOD Beirut in Lebanon
Polina Yakobson, ITS 2013 Finalist, for her presentation at NCAD in Dublin, Ireland
Nelly Hoffmann, ITS 2013 Finalist, for her presentation at the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne
Annelie Gross, ITS 2013 Finalist, for her presentation at the Akademie Mode Design Mueller & Sohn in Munich, Germany
Saana Wang, ITS EIGHT Finalist, for her presentation at the Helsinki Metropolitan University of Applied Sciences in Finland
Vaibhav Singh, ITS 2013 Finalist, for his presentation at NIFT New Delhi, India
Felix Chabluk Smith, ITS 2013 Finalist, for his presentation at the Royal College of Art in London, UK

If you would like to see more pictures of the presentations by the ITS Ambassadors, you can have a look at the photo albums we’ve uploaded on our Facebook page International Talent Support. Not only did we spread the word about ITS through the voice of our finalists: we also travelled ourselves and went to several other schools to meet young designers directly and, most importantly, view the projects they are working on. This helps us understand more about what we will receive and eventually support contestants during the finalists’ selections, in case their portfolio doesn’t explain in detail their project as we saw it in person when we met them. We do this every year (we call it the “Scouting Tour”) and this year it took us to schools in London, Italy and Belgium.

It is also a wonderful occasion to meet up with past finalists based in the cities we travel to. In London for instance we had the opportunity to meet up with Marcus Wilmont (ITS FOUR winner) and his partner Maki Aminaka, with Aitor Throup (ITS FIVE winner) and with a whole bunch of about 20 different ITS FAMILY members for a drink at the bar of our hotel… From Takashi Sugioka (ITS THREE) to Cat Potter (ITS 2013) it was quite moving seeing them all together… Were you among those who attended the presentations? Would you like us to come to your school next time? Let us know! The ITS 2014 Presenting Tour was a success and we want to repeat it. In 2015 one of the ITS Ambassadors might come to your college. Even better: should you become a finalist this year, YOU could be our next ambassador… who knows?