Interning for a Small Company During a Big Pandemic Lucy Castles' Internship Experience at South Castles

When I first heard we weren’t going to have school for the rest of spring term early March, one of the first things that crossed my mind was the potential loss of an internship, or not being able to find one at all. As weeks passed, all of the potential companies I wanted an internship with all emailed me saying the position was closed and to try again for a different summer. It was then that I reached out to my future advisor Chloe Grizzy at South Castles in Wilmington, North Carolina, about interning for them for the summer when I realized it might be the perfect happy accident that I had not yet found an internship.

My name is Lucy Castles and I am a rising senior Strategic Corporate Communication Major with a Minor in Leadership. This summer I was fortunate enough to intern with South Castles, a cruelty free, factory free, vegan swimwear and clothing company created in 2009 by Caroline Castles. It is a very small company with only three employees and the two interns that are seasonal.

What I loved about this internship was that it was very hands on. I learned a lot about all of the important aspects when it comes to running a swimsuit business, from being behind the scenes at a photoshoot, to selling the actual swimsuits, and everything in between. Some of the bulk of the work was using Big Commerce, the platform that the companies’ website is run on. Website design is not something I had ever been familiar with or really even tried, but once I learned how to upload products to the website I was able to help further with the layout and picked the photos for the new Summer collection.

The promotional image I created for the event “Bikinis and Blowouts”.

One of the main parts of my internship was planning and hosting a Summer ’20 line pop-up shop called “Bikinis and Blowouts”. The event took place at SET Blowout Bar, a popular local Wilmington salon, and featured drinks by a local Wilmington distillery. A highlight of planning this event was being able to use all female owned, local companies and bringing them together to generate more business for all of them.

The company was worried about the success of the event and whether or not people would come considering COVID and the new mask rule. As a result, myself and the other intern did as much as possible to market for the event, including making fliers that we gave out and hung up at surf shops, to handing out South Castles stickers with the event information on them. All of the hard work and effort we put in made it so the pop-up was very successful, we actually ended up getting record sales for any of the companies pop-up shops. We were thrilled by the turn out and the amount of sales generated from the event, so much so that we decided to work with the company here at Chapman for a pop-up shop happening in the end of August for students and people of Orange.

The sticker I designed for the pop-up shop, displayed with some of the small items sold.

The experience gave me a lot of very useful knowledge on how a company runs that could only be acquired from working inside and seeing how much actually goes into it. I have always been very interested in fashion and have a particular interest with working for a surf brand in the future, and working exclusively with swimwear gave me a good idea of what that might be like.

The knowledge I have learned from my classes was also very helpful going into this internship. One example of this is how I used knowledge I had gained from Communication Marketing to create a campaign for the company involving a new ‘Surf Club’ to encourage people to want to sign up for the email list to get more people interested in the newsletter. Another useful tool was my knowledge about Canva, which I had used in many different SCC classes, and I was able to use this for many different things, such as creating promotional images and the stickers.

The most valuable thing I found from this internship was how important it is to be flexible and be willing to do all different types of things in a work place, especially when it comes to a small company. Also, how important it is to be doing something you love. South Castles stands for so much more than just being a swimsuit company; it is female run, it is a small business, and it gives back a portion of the proceeds every month to a charitable cause, which are all of the things I look for and appreciate about a company. This being said, my advice to people looking for internships in the future would be to make sure you are interested in the company you are going to be interning for, and the company values are similar to your own.