Fashion Students Well-Suited to Consult on a UK Tailoring Brand
Humber students in the Fashion Management graduate certificate program and degree program worked alongside students from Nottingham Trent University in the Fashion Communications postgraduate program for four weeks on a Collaborative Online International Consultancy Project. The students collaborated with Nicholas Simon to work on a live project for his luxury tailoring brand based in the UK. The project involved creating a strategy for targeting Nicholas Simon’s core consumers and building the brand’s social media presence.
With Nicholas launching his own business in 2020, amidst the difficulties of a pandemic, students were asked to conduct relevant research to consult on possible steps to successfully target his intended customer and help build brand awareness. Students were separated into four groups to complete this project.
As a student working on this project, my group began by researching Nicholas Simon’s brand, his target market and their subsequent behaviour, as well as his competitors. We then employed an array of strategic planning techniques and utilized frameworks recommended to us by our advisors including the Double Diamond method, SWOT analysis, Pestle analysis, and Empathy Maps to organize our research and make sense of our findings.
My group then used our research to create a strategy that we believed Nicholas could implement to reach his core consumer and compiled some other recommendations that Nicholas could implement in the future to increase brand awareness and brand loyalty.
We organized countless meetings, overcoming the time difference and our busy schedules, to strategize concepts we felt the brand would benefit from. After receiving thorough feedback from our advisors, we then revised and reworked those concepts until we collectively felt confident in our recommendations and believed they would be best suited for the Nicholas Simon Tailoring brand. We each drew on the knowledge we had acquired throughout our studies and our own experiences to help us. We also ensured we had enough research and findings to back up each of our recommendations. We then created a compelling and visually appealing presentation that represented our intimate knowledge of the brand and pitched our ideas to Nicholas Simon himself for consideration in front of our advisors and our peers.
Nicholas listened carefully to each presentation, asked thoughtful questions, gave feedback regarding feasibility, and was excited to move forward with implementing some of the recommendations put forth by each group.
A big thanks to the project coordinators and leaders Rossie Kadiyska, Vladimira Steffek, Cam-Ly Nguyen (Humber college), and Mary-Anne Ball (NTU) for organizing this project and allowing students from Humber to connect with students from NTU and gain relevant first-hand consultancy experience!
