Fashion sense
Sometimes on the road between matriculation and graduation you take a course that's so compelling it changes your life.
That's what happened to Morgan Reid-Spaulding '16 and Annys Aristy '16 at the London
College of Fashion, where they studied last year in a semester abroad. In a course
for clothing buyers, the two learned the ins and outs of tailoring products for particular
clothing lines and keeping up on trends. They also discovered Overdressed: The Shockingly
High Cost of Cheap Fashion, in which journalist Elizabeth Cline chronicles entrenched
industry practices that are ravaging our planet.
That course changed the way both seniors look at the world and gave them the determination
to make a difference. That's why they're working hard to win the $20,000 first prize
in next week's Kenneth A. Freirich Business Plan Competition, Friday, April 8, at
5 p.m. in the upstairs conference rooms of Murray-Aikins Dining Hall.
What would they do with $20,000? Produce their first line of affordable and on-trend
outfits made solely of recyclable polyester and show the world how it's done. Good
Citizen would be the only brand in the market to bring all three elements together.
Advising Good Citizen is Nancy Wekselbaum '73, serving for the fourth time as a mentor
in the competition. She focuses especially on showing young entrepreneurs how to generate
numbers that will withstand the judges' interrogation following their five-minute
pitch.
Wekselbaum thought Good Citizen had great potential when she picked them at the February
26 semifinals. Reid-Spaulding is the brand visionary and strategist and Aristy the
supreme organizer, the commander who gets things done, just as she did in directing
the Ujima Fashion Show six weeks ago. "Our personalities and skill sets mesh well
together," says Reid-Spaulding.
Both Reid-Spaulding and Aristy are management and business majors, and both were transformed,
as most students are, by their MB107 experience. That's the foundational course in
which students write five-year strategic plans for real Fortune 500 companies and
pitch them to real business executives.
Now Reid-Spaulding and Aristy are writing plans for their own company-and that's really
exciting, they say. "We had to do it," says Reid-Spaulding. "There's a huge opportunity
to fill a market niche and we can help save the planet. What more could you want?"
