Studying design can lead to obscurity – or your own boutique and collection for the high street

The career of a design student can follow a harsh and predictable path: a degree show in a campus hall, then a couple of years at the Waitrose checkout while awaiting world notice.

Graphic design graduate Jo Jackson and fashion graduates Kate Harwood and Kristjana Williams, however, launched themselves with more bombast. Tenacity, luck and initiative won them a premises rent-free in London's Covent Garden in which to stage their end-of-year exhibition.

A year later the trio had opened a full-time shop in the West End to showcase the work of other fledgling designers and were commissioned to design a collection for Topshop.

"We had the idea for a store when we were still at college, but it took us a year to get the courage and money together," says Jackson, who graduated in 2003 from the University of the Arts, Central St Martins, in London. "Our graduate show in Covent Garden was supposed to last three weeks, but it was such a success that it went on for six months. We went back with a business idea to our landlord who let us have a store rent-free in Newburgh  Street, which was full of fairly mainstream shops. They recognised the publicity potential of having a one-off boutique harvesting new trends."

The shop, Beyond the Valley, launched with a £5,000 investment from the three graduates' savings. "We built the space ourselves and got in stock on a sale or return basis," says Jackson. "Kate's family are in clothes production and donated T-shirts which we printed up ourselves; that was the start of our Beyond the Valley brand."

The store's strength was that it sold fashion and design available nowhere else. The founding principle was to give new graduates and emerging designers a platform to help them launch independent careers. Jackson, Harwood and Williams toured graduate shows to spot the best talent and invited new designers to contact them.

"When we graduated it was very difficult for designers to get noticed," says Jackson, who has now left the store to set up a design consultancy I Am Beyond. "We wanted to be a supporting body offering help and advice because no one else was helping graduates get their own label and clientele. This is now changing and degree courses now contain a personal professional development element showing students the nitty gritty of how to deliver stock to the stockists, how to price and invoice and the rest."

About half of Beyond the Valley's stock is from new designers – around 50 at any one time, half comprises the store's own label created by an in-house team. The result is cutting-edge clothing, jewellery, homeware and gadgets at non-threatening prices.

Their output – and the quirkiness of the shop – has attracted Jarvis Cocker, Mika and other music names as customers and earned a ranking in the top UK Coolbrands for the past four years alongside Vivienne Westwood and Aston Martin. Several of the designers Beyond the Valley has helped now have national reputations. Two, JoJo and Malou, have launched a collection for Topshop, Pudel is stocked worldwide and Rhian Hancox creates leatherware for Paul Smith.

The store still scouts for new names. Aspiring talent should send three or four low-resolution images of their work to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .