Akron Beacon Journal

KENT, Ohio  (MCT) — Fashionistas, a new store in downtown Kent, Ohio, features designs by Kent State students, alums and faculty. The fledgling Fashion School store offers clothing, jewelry and other accessories in a small, post-modern space suffused with gray and black.

“This is a real store that is selling product,” said Nancy Stanforth, the KSU associate professor of fashion design and merchandising who is quarterbacking the project. The store is tucked into a modest, 750-square-foot space in Acorn Alley II, the expanded shopping mecca on Erie Street in downtown Kent. The area is giving rise to a new hotel, parking deck, shops and businesses, with an esplanade linking the district to campus just an eighth-of-a-mile away.

Acorn Alley developer Ron Burbick got the project off the ground, asking area residents what kind of shops they wanted in the eclectic strip of small stores that now sell everything from popcorn to toys. Some residents asked for “some connection to the fashion school,” he recalled. “They wanted to see what the students were doing and purchase their product.”

J.R. Campbell, director of the KSU School of Fashion Design and Merchandising, said the resulting store appears to be breaking new ground in the student-fashion industry. He said he’s not aware of other off-campus retail outlets that focus on student products. “We’re constantly trying to push the limits and learn something new,” Campbell said.

The store is emphasizing student- or alumni-made garments in a range of sizes, said Stanforth, the store adviser. That includes skirts made by KSU fashion school alumna Eileen Smith, who markets a specialty line called Tie My Bow from Canal Fulton.

Some designs showcase prints developed by the Fashion School’s textile lab. That includes black and white cotton coats, originally designed through a research grant from Cotton Inc. Two samples are draped on mannequins in the store, with more to be made and available at $300 a pop.

But the store offers more affordable merchandise, too — jewelry, T-shirts, pillows, yoga pants, computer bags and tote bags with the Fashion School logo. The latter were designed last year by KSU students Nick Nero of Burton and Aaron Hernandez of Streetsboro.

Their totes are being made to their specs by Z Manufacturing of Missouri and are the precursor to a bigger line that Hernandez has in his sights. He is designing a limited menswear line this year that he would make in-house and could sell in the store.

“I want to build this up while I’m still in school and take this full-steam ahead when I get out,” said Hernandez, a junior. This is not a consignment shop, so students and alumni are paid outright for their work. Faculty contributions are donated, in order to avoid a conflict of interest.

Still, the store has been a challenge to get off the ground, said Stanforth, who is teaching fashion marketing this spring. Burbick, the developer, jump-started the project by giving $10,000-a-year to the KSU Foundation. The contribution from his Burbick Foundation almost covers the university lease, he said.

That left Stanforth and other KSU officials to put the store together— and that’s been a challenge. Stanforth has had trouble finding a manufacturer willing to make a mere half-dozen copies of a design. The job finally fell to a talented local seamstress and her partners who adapt patterns provided by the designers.

Nor is there a ready team of students ready to step into the roles of buyers who decide what will sell, how to get it manufactured and at what price to sell it. For now, Stanforth is overseeing the business with student managers Scott Bunner of Parma Heights and Brandi Rankin from Riva, Md.

Meanwhile, the store will need a continuing stream of new products to keep customers coming back. Eventually, students in an entrepreneurship class will take over the complex job of selecting the product and overseeing the production. A full-time manager could be hired to take over all the threads of the business, Stanforth said.

But for that to happen, the store will have to make money. Whether it can — compelling designs or not –still is up in the air. “We hope that it is wildly successful and if not it gives us a chance to learn from what we do,” Campbell, the fashion school director, said.

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Reprinted with permission from the MCT Campus News Service