Blog Post 8

Hi, everyone!

 

With eight blog posts and nine weeks of developments on this Capstone engagement in the books, I'm certainly looking forward to taking a bit of a break away from classes! I'll be in Nicaragua for the week - where is everyone else going?

 

Related to our project, Katie and I have made significant strides in wrapping up much of our tactical execution planning for the DAAP Fashion Show. We had the awesome opportunity to connect with current DAAP Senior Capstone Fashion Design students, learning more about their inspired work and how they plan to encapsulate five years of painstaking labor into five runway-ready pieces. From our engagement with them and a follow up meeting with our client, here are a few great takeaways from this week:

• Take time to re-center. Deep in the midst of tactical execution, creating calendars, and reaching out to contacts, it has been easy to forget about the true purpose of why we are assisting Laurie, Zach, and Dianne with the fashion show. Meeting the students was an incredible reminder of the why, and seeing their eyes light up as they described their work was a true inspiration to keep striving. Yes, every ticket we sell is a part of an elaborate marketing strategy guided by objectives and frameworks, but when marketing works, it means so much more. This re-centering allowed us to remember that the students' designs should be  championed, and we hope to reflect their hard work with equal diligence in execution on our part.
• Be flexible with client communication. Unveiling our exciting updates on our social media and other communication executions to the client, we immediately received an email: "This is great, but way too much to take in. Can we meet tomorrow afternoon?" Thanks to a flexible schedule as fifth years, Katie and I had time to sit down with our client for an impromptu meeting, and found that hammering out details and questions was a far, far more efficient way to communicate with the client than a formal email or meeting. This reminded us that, while we strive to follow a framework of communication, sometimes the client just needs to "talk things out" over a five minute call or white boarding session. We're lucky to have a client who is excited with our work thus far, and plan to continue to keep up on this progress!

 

Have a great spring break, everyone!