Shaping a regenerative Fashion School
frog worked with the head of the fashion school, faculty, students and industry partners to develop a new long term vision, brand story and curriculum strategy that incorporates sustainability and DEI into every aspect of the School of Fashion’s curriculum and learning environment.
In my role as Design Lead on this program, I led the design of our remote stakeholder Miro collaborative workshops, guide the concept exploration of our visual designers, and delivery of prototypes of various digital touchpoints to bring this future vision to life. We also delivered a custom career toolkit for students aligned to the brand vision that enables each person to actively shape and achieve a new type of education experience and career path for themselves.
Design Research
Collaborative Workshops
Brand Strategy & Synthesis
Moodboard Compilation
Concept ideation
Executive Presentation
Interactive UI Prototyping
Visual Identity Systems
Brand Playbook Design
Curriculum Toolkit Design
Kent State School of Fashion
The Kent State School of Fashion is an internationally renowned fashion school that is consistently ranked in the top 5 in the US. The School of Fashion has long held its own against competitors by carving out a unique space for themselves with an international Study Away program, and multiple state of the art facilities exploring the intersection of fashion and technology.
Like many educational institutions, the school has faced an extremely challenging time in the wake of COVID — quickly adapting to delivering classes remotely (less than ideal for many studio based courses at the school). The School has also seen a drop in applications recently — related to the global pandemic. The School is using this moment to reassess their positioning and offering.
The Challenge
The fashion industry is responsible for 10% of the world’s carbon emissions. Activists have also thrown the industry’s lack of diversity and unfair labor practices in the spotlight. The calls for change are loud from activists as well as consumers. The fashion industry has woken up to these problems — and are looking to rapidly transform their practices in the next decade.
What does it mean to be a leading global fashion school in this context and in this unique moment in time? How can the School of Fashion shape the next generation of conscious leaders in fashion?
Making every voice count
To build an inclusive and sustainable future for the school, we ensured that the process was as inclusive and collaborative as possible. Through a series of 5 collaborative workshops and 2 surveys we invited students, alumni, faculty and industry partners to co-create the future brand story and curriculum experience. We used frog’s brand strategy framework to facilitate conversations around the brand direction and positioning. We built a custom curriculum framework to drive holistic conversations around new programs and courses that were aligned to the brand direction.
A nuanced take on inclusivity
One of the key focus areas of the program was to embed diversity, equity and inclusion in the school’s experience as well as curriculum. It is important define diversity as broadly as possible and consider the intersectional experiences that students belonging to multiple underrepresented groups face. We created 3 student personas who represented this spectrum of intersectional and diverse needs. One student persona represented the needs of BIPOC and first-generation college students. Another represented the needs of international students.
Our third persona Reese, represented the needs of trans and non-binary students. By using small but powerful cues like using they/them pronouns for this persona — we built awareness and empathy. We worked to highlight the needs of underrepresented students without tokenising them. While Reese represented the needs of trans and non-binary students — this aspect isn’t the entirety of this persona’s needs. Reese was also a grad student who was looking to change careers and move into the fashion industry.
The sustainability paradox
During our brand validation workshop, one of the students raised the point of how the topic of racial justice needs its own space. Combining this topic with sustainability, signaled to her that it wasn’t being taken seriously. Another student pointed out that it also mattered who was talking about or teaching sustainability — a diverse faculty was essential to ensure that the needs of black, indigenous and other underrepresented communities were being considered.
This was a key moment and insight that reshaped our final brand direction. While we kept the holistic approach to sustainability that considered people and planet — we added a new layer focused on the school’s anti-racist commitments and actions.
An invitation to build together
Living up to our values of inclusivity and our brand promise of ‘Impact Through Action’, we invited the audience of our presentation to dive into the new School of Fashion experience and explore the interactive prototypes by scanning the QR code on the presentation. We built this to enable the client to create a powerful and immersive invitation and call to action for industry partners to build this future vision together with the school.
Deliverables
Our deliverables struck a balance between delivering a bold and engaging long-term vision for the school as well as a detailed strategy, roadmap and tangible recommendations for achieving that vision. We also built an MVP version of one of the recommendations in the form of a career toolkit for students.
We brought the vision to life with a set of interactive prototypes — showcasing a new website and social media story. The detailed brand and curriculum strategy recommendations were delivered as a modular Brand and Strategy Playbook. The MVP career toolkit was delivered in the form of a printable document and custom worksheets.
Strategy & Brand Playbook
With the strategic language from our Strategy Lead, I designed this strategy and brand playbook to help the faculty and staff at the School of Fashion and the university, operationalise the strategy and bring the vision to life. Together, we detailed a holistic curriculum approach and strategy along with a roadmap for implementation. We also defined the strategic brand foundation and visual direction that could be implemented by the school’s editorial and marketing teams.
Career Toolkit
To support the expanded emphasis of the school’s curriculum on sustainable and inclusive fashion - we built a custom toolkit with reflective exercises to enable students to explore various possibilities and pathways during their time at school and prepare them to lead the change in the industry when they graduate.
Curriculum Recommendations
Our holistic curriculum approach ensures that every student at the School of Fashion learns the fundamentals of each of these core topics. These topics were built based on inputs from students, faculty, industry partners, alumni and our competitive analysis of peer schools. We then defined and prioritized topics and courses to be added to the current curriculum and provided a 5-year roadmap.
Credits
Team size 6
Executive Design Director: Kara Pecknold
Lead, Strategy Director: Sesh Vedachalam
Design Lead: Trisha Tan
Visual Designers: Paul Knipper, Grace Hong
Business Strategist/Research: Sydney Morrison
Program Manager: Elizabeth Chism
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We took particular care to pull this diverse and global team of frogs together for this program. The team combined the best of frog’s expertise in fashion, branding, sustainability, DEI and curriculum design. Located across 4 studios — the team worked across 4 time zones for 9 weeks to deliver a successful outcome to the client.
