From Fashion & Luxury to MBA — Positioning Your Profile for Admissions

This is a four-session package for someone building an MBA application out of a fashion, luxury or retail career. I made this exact move, from buying at Bergdorf Goodman into an MBA at NYU Stern and then into strategy at LVMH, and the hardest part was not the application mechanics. It was that a career in this industry reads to an admissions committee as creative, operational and hard to size, when it is in fact commercial, quantitative and full of decisions with money attached. Session 1 — Why an MBA, and the school list. We settle what the degree is for: a pivot into strategy or finance, a move from brand side to corporate, a market change, or building something of your own. Then we build a realistic school list against that goal, including the programs with genuine luxury and consumer strength rather than only the obvious names. If the honest answer turns out to be that you do not need an MBA, I will tell you. Session 2 — Translating your profile. Your career rewritten in the terms an admissions committee reads for: scope, budget, revenue, headcount, the decisions you owned and what happened as a result. Most fashion and retail candidates undersell themselves here — a buyer managing a territory budget is running a business, and it has to be written that way. We also work out how to handle the parts of the industry that do not translate: unusual titles, flat structures, brands nobody outside the industry knows. Session 3 — Essays and recommenders. The structure of your central story: where you have been, why this program, what specifically comes after, and how it carries across each essay without repeating itself. We also plan your recommenders: who to ask, in what order, what to give them, and how to brief someone who has never written one of these before. Session 4 — Interview preparation. The questions you will certainly get, including why an MBA rather than staying on your current track, and why now. We will practise talking about a creative-industry career to an audience that does not know it, without either apologizing for it or over-explaining it. Between sessions, send me essay drafts, CV versions or school research and I will come back to you within 48 hours on weekdays.