CFDA’s partnership with Accenture includes creating talent-development programs for today’s designers with Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive. Through Fjord’s Immersion Program, CFDA designers are imbedded in Design Studies (Fjord’s method of looking at the innovation process) with the team in Fjord’s New York studio.
To date, Fjord and CFDA have collaborated on two workshops, two designer immersions, and mentorship for our Elaine Gold Launch Pad designers. In working with Fjord, CFDA hopes to foster creativity and look at design strategy in new ways.
“Working with CFDA has been an amazing experience for us at Fjord and Accenture,” said John Jones, Fjord’s Design Strategy Lead. “This powerful collaboration has revealed many new insights and has resulted in new ideas and points of view not only for designers, but also for the future of fashion and retail.”
The first designer immersion took place in June with CFDA+ 2016 Design Graduate Tiffany Huang (pictured), followed by a second immersion in August with Harvard Researcher and 2016 RISD Apparel Alum Taylor Greenberg-Goldy.
Huang and Greenberg-Goldy both worked separately with Fjord for a week at their NYC studio. Huang’s work focused on researching the digital experiences within SoHo retail spaces. One thing that stood out from their research, Huang said, “was that we learned that stores are pushing on technology, but this technology lacks a story.”
To conclude their immersion, the Fjord team and Huang developed a system for storytelling to establish a story for CFDA’s Cadillac Retail Lab.
During Greenberg-Goldy’s time with Fjord, she worked on the retail experience for Prabal Gurung’s upcoming residency at CFDA’s Cadillac Retail Lab. Of her takeaways from the experience, she stressed the importance of “human-subject testing” to the retail and fashion industry as whole.
“We’re living in a time where technology is in exponential growth and fashion is continuing to figure out how to best use it,” Greenberg-Goldy said. “As technology changes, designers and retail stores must adapt with it. In simple terms, there is so much ‘tech’ thrown into retail stores without truly understanding how a user responds to it and how it affects their behavior.
“Fjord,” she added, “is the keystone to understanding consumers on a deeper level in order to be successful in a time of a technological innovation.”
The immersion program is part of a broader collaboration between Accenture and the CFDA to help shape how the fashion industry integrates consumer insights into business practices. This included a Fjord workshop presentation on “How Designing a Collection is like Designing a Business” to more than 150 educators, industry thought leaders and designers at the CFDA’s 6th Annual Fashion Education Summit earlier this year. Fjord also did an encore to more than 60 design graduates at CFDA’s inaugural Fashion Future Graduate Showcase in May. The presentation challenged the thinking around the fashion industry system with design and business acumen – pushing beyond the design of collections and more towards designing the business as a working system and brand.
