From the classroom to the collection
I started at the University of California, Berkeley in September 2000 and finished a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at the Haas School of Business in May 2004, with a minor in fashion design. I treat those years as questions I still use when a line looks finished.
The path was in two parts. Foundational coursework at Berkeley came first. Upper-division study was in Haas: business management, marketing, finance, and strategic management. What remains is a habit of asking what the customer believes they bought, what it costs to keep that belief, and what happens to the brand when the assumption breaks.
Finance did more for my judgment in apparel than any trend report. A style can look inexpensive at the unit cost and expensive as a promise, once quality, returns, and a late fabric are in the number. Marketing, which can sound distant from a cutting table, is the same point from the other side. You are deciding which sentence the brand is allowed to say.
The minor was the other half, and it was not decoration. Fashion design trained a kind of attention the business courses did not: proportion, material, and the difference between an idea and a garment someone can wear. I still want both readings of a collection. One asks whether it can be managed. The other asks whether it is actually designed.
Strategy sits under both. I want the choice that changes the season: which product to develop, which capacity the factory can hold, which market the brand can enter without inventing a second company. A plan that never meets the sample room is a hobby.
I left Berkeley in 2004 with the degree, the minor, and a preference that has stayed. Describe the commercial object honestly. Then go and see whether the garment agrees.