Students from the AAS Fashion Marketing Spring 2018 Retailing course worked on a live brief with H&M. Austin Halbert, CEO of ImpactEd, a social enterprise that connects college classrooms with meaningful real-world projects, helped develop the project with assistant professor Michelle Alleyne. The project was designed to allow students to develop competencies in systems thinking and sustainability while engaging with pressing challenges.

On the first day of the course, students were introduced to the mission: to design a retail strategy that H&M could roll out to accelerate customer adoption of clothing made from sustainable materials, and to rethink the company’s garment recycling initiative. They explored promotion, global retailing, technology, image development and innovative practices in retailing.

Students were divided into four teams and pitched their concepts to the H&M team on the last day of the course. Emily Scarlett, Media Relations Manager at H&M, awarded the winning team a prize of $4,000 who she said “did an excellent job at coming up with a thorough game plan from concept to execution and were fully motivated to be a part of a compelling and creative solution for real-world impact.”