FASHION ACCELERATOR 360

Recently, I had a great opportunity to take a FA360 course.

So, here's a little rundown, Fashion Accelerator 360 is a site that offers online courses for the fashion and lifestyle industries and are all instructed by established experts. There's several 4-week classes to pick from like 'Social Media 101', 'The Business of Blogging' and 'Branding A-Z', just to name a few. I chose to take 'Launch Your Line' taught by Lisa Deyrmenjian.

I graduated from FIDM with a major in Fashion Design and it was a great school in terms of learning the fundamentals of design. But I've learned a lot since completing college and immersing myself in the industry and because of that, I really believe that you can never stop perfecting your craft - especially if you're looking to grow and move forward within your field.

So I was really grateful when I was offered to take a course with FA360 and in fact, it came at the perfect time for me. With the steady growth of 16th Colony I've been needing to scale things up a bit with sourcing and manufacturing. In my previous jobs, my role was to solely focus on designing while other steps of production were already taken care of. So when it came time to start finding my own factories and stuff, you can probably imagine how daunting that all seemed. I wasn't really sure where to start.



The Launch Your Line course was really interesting and informative. There were also a lot of things discussed throughout the 4 weeks that I was already implementing in my brand. A few things that we covered, I'd learned previously, but I'd decided to go against the grain in some ways purposely since the beginning of 16th Colony. But there were truly a lot of details I needed to learn in order to overcome some of the hurdles I was experiencing while growing my business. Hands down Liza knows her stuff, inside and out - she knows this business so incredibly well, is full of ideas and a wealth of industry knowledge. She has the experience to back it up too - Liza started her first factory at the age of 19 and produced a line of her own.

This course in particular, focuses heavily on what it takes to start a line - things like sourcing fabrics and contractors, design, costing and planning your line and marketing/selling to stockists. And like I mentioned, they have several other fashion related courses that are great for not only designers but bloggers, publicists and entrepreneurs as well.

The next 'Launch Your Line' class starting in late September. Feel free to wander on over to the FA360 site and check it out for yourself.