The Thread Union: Kinkos for Clothes

For our thesis, working in a team of 3 students, we spent the semester investigating ways to support small scale fashion designers in their quest to get their collections made and to market. During our research we found that New York City is still the hub of the fashion world, serving as the headquarters to more than 800 fashion-based businesses, twice that of Paris, despite more than 95% of apparel manufacturing moving offshore in the last 40 years.

As a result of that offshore movement, more and more of the more than 22,000 fashion designers in the United States are having difficulty having their clothes made at a reasonable cost. Most offshore manufacturing firms have large minimum requirements, or have questionable quality when it comes to small orders. We saw a New York City based ethical production line as a foil to these large market forces.

Billed as “Kinkos for Clothes,” The Thread Union utilizes technology from large offshore manufacturing plants, such as digital patterns and laser cutting, as well as mass-customization technology, to make the manufacture of 1-1000 pieces affordable and accessible to designers.

The Thread Union provides tools to create, make, edit, produce, manage and sell collections that are eco-efficient, meaningful and authentic. Our online collaboration tools, Collection Capture digitization process, prototyping and sample-making services, and ability to support one-of-a-kind pieces build the backbone to a successful fashion-based business.

The digitization technology breaks the traditional apparel sales model by allowing consumers (both individual and retail) to order only the garments they want from an online showroom, from as little as one piece at a time, up to 1000 pieces. This print-on-demand model is a unique take on apparel manufacturing and helps to minimize the great environmental impact of clothes-making. We save designers money by preventing inventory glut, and save resources by customizing each garment with regard to size.

In addition, we offer a number of community-building components, enabling open-source collaboration between designers. We see the Thread Union serving as a bridge to the future of fashion, where consumers are actually involved in design process.

Pro-forma Profit and Loss statements were used to evaluate potential business models, with the final iteration projecting $6.5 Million in net income over 5 years.

This project was selected to be presented during the inaugural CCA MBA in Design Strategy Venture Show in May 2010.

Full project report available upon request.

Date: Spring 2010
Class: Venture Studio
Contributed to: Secondary Research, Financial Analysis, Ideation, Project Management, Competitive Analysis, Writing

Discover the City

Discover the City is a project which aims to connect new residents with community based businesses in the Washington, D.C. metro area. It is all too easy to move somewhere new and instead of taking the time to learn the neighborhood and its offerings, just go to Target or Walmart to do your shopping.

Discover the City aims to change this behavior, by providing new arrivals with sample baskets of products, in-store events, and custom guidebooks, all tailored to individual tastes. By providing connections to merchants and the community, Discover the City is more than simply a welcome wagon. These baskets do not include coupons, instead they include real products and gift certificates for services in the new resident’s neighborhood.

Based on the principle that business transactions are composed of three steps – visibility, credibility, and ultimately profitability-  Discover the City aims to tackle the first two. The baskets provide small businesses with the visibility they need to the constituents that have the most to gain – new residents. Credibility is achieved through three sub-decisions: is the merchant honest? are they competent? am I inspired to purchase? By trying out the offerings and meeting the merchants, Discover the City helps the new arrival make these determinations, leading to follow-on transactions.

Full project report available upon request.

Date: Fall 2009
Class: Experience Studio
Contributed to: Secondary Research, Writing, Analysis, Financial Analysis, Concept Development, Ideation

Darden Operations Plan for Olive Garden Frozen Food:

Working in a group of 4 students, we developed an operations plan for Darden, parent company of Olive Garden, describing how they could start a frozen food line based on the Olive Garden brand.

We were interested in how a $6.7B corporation, stuck in the declining casual dining market, could further their brand recognition and capture some of the $64.8B frozen food industry. As consumers are more and more changing their dining habits – eating out less frequently and changing the way they shop – this market seemed a prime opportunity for Darden to help it diversify, grow, and become more resilient.

The plan described the state of the industry, and an overall operational strategy, leveraging on the existing infrastructure of Darden – a network of over 2,000 suppliers, existing office space in Orange County, Florida and retail distribution through existing channels. The plan calls for manufacturing of frozen entrees to be done by current vendors, with R&D contracted out to a specialized firm.

In addition the plan described marketing tactics, including re-editing of existing commercials to add in a 5 second teaser for the frozen meals, and attach points to the existing experience. A major initiative was to give coupons to in-restaurant diners, encouraging them to extend their Olive Garden experience to their own kitchens.

A financial projection, calculated using a demand forecast and scaled financial statements from the Darden annual report, shows the endeavor should net approximately $100M in three years.

This project was purely speculative, and included no contact with Darden by the team.

Full project report available upon request.

Date: Fall 2009
Class: Operations and Strategy
Contributed to: Secondary Research, Writing, Analysis, Financial Analysis, Concept Development, Ideation

Rethinking Disaster Housing: Interim Community:
In a group of 3 students, acting as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) we developed a new approach to disaster housing – one that goes beyond simply providing shelter and gets the community involved in cleanup and recovery.

The inspiration for the project comes in the form of a quote from the FEMA National Disaster Housing Strategy (January 2009) – “Even if interim housing assistance is well planned, delivered rapidly, and tailored to meet the needs of disaster victims and communities, it will not provide the same level of stability and security that comes with long-term housing.”

It was this challenge that propelled us to think beyond providing shelter and to instead provide a sense of community that accelerated recovery and helped people to get back to their normal lives.

Current solutions – such as the trailers given to Katrina victims – are unacceptable. They are unsustainable, poisonous for long-term use, and have no longevity.

The housing portion of the plan created reusable, stackable shelters out of abandoned steel shipping containers and recycled and recyclable materials. Additional community modules were conceived, forming the basis for a village layout. These include a water supply tank, generator shed, community center, tool library, community kitchen, laundry facilities and a mobile medical van among others.

In lieu of rent for the mobile shelters, a Jobs Corps was created. In order to facilitate clean up and recovery, all able-bodied men and women older than 18 in each household must assist in the cleanup and rebuilding for at least 40 hours per month. Some private sector jobs such as police and fire department work can would meet this requirement. In addition, full time employment through the Job Corps would be available.

Lastly, we described a number of temporary and permanent policy changes that would need to be implemented for the project to take off, including such measures as allowing for rainfall collection and use of greywater systems.

All shelters would be returned, cleaned, and stored once recovery was complete.

This project was purely speculative, and included no contact with the Federal Emergency Management Agency by the team.

Full project report available upon request.

Date: Spring 2009
Class: Sustainability Studio
Contributed to: Secondary Research, Writing, Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Concept Development, Ideation

Routes to Health:
Developed with a small group of students, a patient-centered service, Routes to Health provides one-on-one home visits by traveling pharmacist in collaboration with community pharmacists and referring physicians, serving individuals whose medical conditions are impacted by Low English Proficiency.

By returning to the house call, Routes to Health provides patient-centered medication support, and expands the reach of community based pharmacies. With over 13,000 community pharmacists in the United States, over 40% of nation’s retail prescription drugs are dispensed through them. These pharmacists are critical to ensuring optimal medication therapy outcomes and contribute to the lowering of overall healthcare costs.

In addition, there is an opportunity space surrounding Low English Proficiency (LEP) adults in the U.S. Currently they number over 22 million, with a growth rate of 2.5 million new LEP adults each year. These 22 million patients account for 336 million prescriptions annually. We find that LEP and low health literacy leads to high risk of unsafe use of prescription medicines, especially when health care providers do not provide adequate time or verbal communication to these patients.

Routes to Health addresses this need through the one-on-one home visit, allowing pharmacists to spend time with patients and help them understand how to properly take their medicines, and following up on side effects and environmental factors that may contribute to their condition.

Lastly, as part of an integrated technology solution, Routes to Health monitors disease tracking indicators over time in neighborhoods. Research shows that prescriptions are often the first indicator of a disease epidemic within a community – heart disease, diabetes or otherwise. Through careful monitoring, pharmacists can know when an education and intervention campaign should be launched for a particular community.

Date: Fall 2008
Class: Innovation Studio
Contributed to: Primary and Secondary Research, Concept Development, Logo Design, Persona Development