Major Insights: Fashion Business Management

I just wanted to give a little bit of history of who we are and how we got here, and then I will introduce our faculty who will walk through the actual presentation. Let’s go back 10 years. CCS was looking to expand their program offerings and I was living a nice life in Florence, Italy and London. I was lucky enough to share my life between the two cities and they said there’s a job in Detroit. They wanted to open a new fashion school department at the College for Creative Studies. I came to Detroit, completely fell in love with the city and the college, and we launched a fashion accessories design program. For the first four to five years, we taught shoes and handbags. I felt like we needed to add an apparel component to it, as we did, and that was about four years ago.

To be a complete fashion school, we needed to add maybe one of the most important parts of the fashion system, which is fashion business. So now we feel like we have a complete fashion ecosystem being taught at CCS. I’m super proud of the results we have gotten with our student placements and the opportunities and all the incredible companies that come and help us to develop the program and support our students and our department. I will introduce you to the person who helped me write this program collaboratively in a moment and she can tell you more about the collaborations.

The history of me and why I’m super excited about this is I’ve been in the industry for several decades. I’ve been a strategic partner with many brands. I taught in Polimoda, Florence in Italy, which is a Ferragamo-run fashion school, a top fashion school in Italy. I taught their luxury management classes including fashion brand management and fashion strategy. I understood that there’s a type of student that’s really good at it, that loves fashion but doesn’t want to design it or make things, but wants to be involved in this super exciting world of fashion. When I came to CCS, I understood that we need to launch something similar here in Detroit, which we just did. We have taught fashion business classes for close to 10 years already, so that’s not anything new for us, but the BA program is something new and we are quite excited to launch that.

That’s a little bit of the background. That’s about me. I will now introduce you to faculty Monica Sinclair, who has an incredible wealth of experience in the field of fashion business management. I will give the stage to her and I will turn my camera off for the time being, but feel free to put any questions in the chat. So Monica, are you ready?

Yes, thank you Aki. Hello everybody. As Aki mentioned, my name is Monica Sinclair and I am faculty here at the College for Creative Studies. What Aki and I have put together is really an incredible program that serves the student needs and the industry needs right now at this critical moment where many students are being overburdened by intense course loads that are almost impossible to accomplish within a 4-year degree program. Aki and I took a look at our own professional and academic experience, looked at many different programs and the courses we have been offering for a number of years now, and we’ve decided to move forward and finally launch this program, which is really well needed at this moment.

A little bit about me: I’ve been teaching for many years, but the heart of my experience is within the fashion industry. I’ve spent a good number of years, almost a decade, working for Adidas within the fashion group located in New York City. We worked on product launches to brand launches for all of the Adidas collaborations, from Kanye West to Yohji Yamamoto to building Y-3, to collabs with Stella McCartney, Raf Simons, Rick Owens, and Opening Ceremony to name a few. Throughout my career, my role was in marketing and I had overseen the marketing for North and South America for the Adidas fashion group division. Eventually, I had left and gone over to Rick Owens where my career there really covered expanding their footwear business and brand partnerships for Dark Shadow. Eventually, I had gone on to work for a licensing company overseeing 12 different brands in men’s fashion and sport and lifestyle where I was global director of marketing at Authentic Brands Group, who now owns many brands and really tackles that realm of licensing.

My education has brought me from New York, teaching at FIT and NYU, to SCAD for a number of years, and eventually to the heart of Detroit, which is a city that I adore. I’ve been here for a number of years and working for CCS for a number of years. I do remember when Aki first came and we talked about this dream of launching a fashion business program, and here we are. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be talking to this first cohort here. I am going to delve into a couple of slides here that I put together for you guys just to share with you a bit about the program, how it’s structured, what it’ll look like for you, and what some expectations are once completed and along the way.

As I mentioned, this program is a three-year program where we’ve meticulously gone through every single course, looked at all of the fashion schools out there, and looked at our existing programming. We connected with our partners who the school already has a very good relationship with and who serve on our advisory board, such as the president of Hermès. She helped us fine-tune this program, as well as a head designer of Calvin Klein and many people from LVMH, Martin Rose, and a number of other major fashion organizations. We really asked them what they expect in new hires and new candidates, and what they expect them to be skilled at or know. That was really the heartbeat of how we built this program.

Essentially it is a 90-credit program. It is a Bachelor of Arts degree that you will earn and it can be completed in three years. Our goal in mind is to require zero summer classes as well as no overloads, really just staying true to our north star of what we will complete within three years. This program is a component of our structure and the fashion program that was really necessary to exist because we mirror the fashion industry within the education that we give. To state a clearer fact, most careers and roles within the fashion industry are within the business side of things, roughly about 75%. It is a huge, important sector that makes this industry function, builds up really powerful brands, and supports the small mom-and-pop ones, as well as provides the merchandising to the products that we love to obtain, the marketing messages that we read and scroll through on our Instagram, and helps the stores function that we go and shop at. These roles really do drive the industry forward.

What’s so cool and special about this program, which is what excites me the most, is that it is the very first three-year degree program within fashion that exists. It really positions us in a great spot in comparison to other schools that are struggling to maintain a curriculum map of four years. What that means for you guys is that within those three years, it is carefully curated so that as you travel through the program, you are learning the business foundations in year one, eventually delving into the creative side. If you guys are anything like myself when I was a college student, I loved and appreciated the fashion industry, but I had no idea that I could have a creative career within it. It is for those of you who are creatives, who have a passion for this industry, and this major is your sweet spot. It is an excellent blend of both creative and artistic vision along with business acumen to really develop strong fashion leaders.

As I mentioned earlier, there are significantly more business roles over design roles, which is great potential for you as you will enter the job market in a few years. In terms of business operations and retail, there’s a vast number of job opportunities. Our students for this program are creative thinkers, the dreamers, the career accelerators, the ones who are just ready to hit the ground running, eager to get into the industry, as well as ones who have their eye on the global industry. Having a global mindset is very important, and that is something we’ll delve into deeply within this degree program.

The way you travel through this three-year structure is you’re learning the core functions and principles that are applied to fashion in year one. After that, you’re moving more so into the creative realm where you are highly focused on blending strategy with creative practice. You learn how to build up brand strategies and marketing strategies. You look to visual merchandising, supply chain, and then you launch into year three, which is the industry immersion portion of the program. We have these partners who are very eager for this program to start; they have been meeting with us for the past few years now as we’ve developed this. They are eager to collaborate, eager to do projects, and eager to hold placements for students of this program at their organizations.

Some of the core skills covered in year one are about the foundation. Sometimes people hear marketing and they think it’s just banging on a calculator, and it’s not that. There’s such a creative aspect to it. The principles that you guys will have a good sound understanding of within year one will really guide you in year two as you develop strategies. In year two, you’re going to shift more from learning to doing. We’re going to look at strategic skills such as merchandising strategy, consumer behavior analysis, trend forecasting, social media marketing, and creative strategy which includes fashion styling.

Right now I currently have students working on a project for Coach where they’ve developed a response to a prompt to develop a “third space” for Gen Z. Students were able to submit their work to this international competition against many other fashion programs like London College of Fashion, FIT, and Parsons. One CCS student—actually two—have recently won internships out of these competitions, which is pretty amazing.

Year three is going to see more integration with industry and professional readiness. At the end of your studies, you’ll develop a capstone project which is a project that supports the direction you want to go into for your career, whether it be fashion event planning, brand strategist, social media manager, or campaign manager. You will focus on a project that will be a big promo piece for you to support the skill sets that you’ve picked up over the past three years. What we intend to do is have mentorship partners and clear guidance and presentations of the final work.

One major component of year three is focusing on leadership. We’re going to look at a lot of case studies but also practice by doing. I intend for you guys to do a lot of industry networking and also think about how this industry needs to change and how you will make your mark on it. The goal is not to produce more of what brands are already doing, but to really use this safe space of our program to launch yourself and to be free.

The curriculum at a glance is 45% business core, 25% creative integration, 20% industry experience, and 10% electives. In the first semester, we launch into Business of Fashion 1, Fashion Business Anthropology, Fashion Brand Management, History of Fashion, and Composition 1. In the history of fashion, we don’t just go into archaic history. It is important to understand that, but we also talk about important references like the 90s, which have a lot of momentum at the moment. The second semester includes Business of Fashion 2, Intro to Sustainability, Fashion Trends, Digital Techniques, and Intro to Material Culture.

In the third semester, you’ll focus on Visual Merchandising, Fashion PR, Strategic Marketing, Fashion Marketing, and Composition 2. The fourth semester will be Product Development, Supply Chain Management, Fashion Buying and Merchandising, Digital Fashion Marketing Practices, and Sponsored Studio. In the final year, it will be Fashion Portfolio where you’ll work on resume and interviewing skills, and Fashion Industry Immersion which is an internship. We will also cover Fashion Ethics and Corporate Sustainability, which is extremely critical. Finally, there will be Fashion Retail Management and Innovation, Fashion Entrepreneurship, Fashion Thesis Studio, and Fashion Styling.

Detroit is an innovation center for thinkers and dreamers. Our partners are very thrilled to get going with this. I’m about to show you guys the fashion show that was put together last year. It was a celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the fashion program. The design seniors present their collections at the show, and our program offers full integration with fashion show production—setting up the show, model bookings, styling, and everything that goes into it.

Basically, the show highlights the talent we have. General Motors was kind enough to give us their venue in the Design Dome for the show. We try to find different places every year to highlight the Detroit region. When you are in the fashion business management program, you will learn to manage all these aspects and building the bridge between design and management. Our placement rate is 84%, which is very high. We’re super proud of this.

From model casting to hair and makeup to the music selection and seating charts, business supports the designers. We are excited to welcome you guys to this accelerated program and provide impeccable experience in terms of industry connections and in-classroom education. My email address is listed there as well as Aki’s. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask now or reach out via email later.

Thank you so much, Monica. By the way, in the previous picture, it looks like I have a mullet. I don’t. I think it was somebody else behind me! Now we’re going to open the floor for questions. Don’t be afraid—we are one big happy fashion family here.