The Foundations of Excellence Management

You will attend general management courses combined with applied management courses. The former will allow you to acquire key concepts and methodological tools that every professional should be familiar with in order to manage a company. The applied management courses, on the other hand, will provide you with an in-depth understanding of key managerial processes in fashion- and design-based companies, as well as in those areas where customer experience plays a key role in defining the firm’s value proposition.

General Management Courses

Financial Reporting and Analysis

• Analyze and discuss the major financial accounting issues related to companies operating in the fashion, design, and luxury industries
• Present and discuss the main tools and methods to analyze financial statements

Corporate Finance I

• Learn how to use financial tools in order to manage key value drivers within a fashion company
• Examine in a systemic way financial statements and company performance in the fashion industry
• Learn how to build and read cash flows and financial ratios
• Examine capital budgeting decisions in fashion companies

Management of Control Systems

• Examine in a systemic way management accounting approaches, with a specific reference to the fashion and luxury industries
• Focus on the management control process, balancing economics and creativity

Fashion Marketing

Learn the conceptual frameworks and analytical tools required to plan marketing activities in a fast-moving and competitive landscape. More specifically:

• Learn how to build an effective marketing plan
• Understand customer behavior in fashion, design, and experience-based markets
• Be equipped with the proper tools to measure actual and potential demand
• Learn about marketing research techniques that can be implemented to collect useful data to support a marketing plan
• Get familiar with specific tools for market segmentation, targeting, and positioning in fashion, design, and experience industries

Data Analysis for Marketing Research + Excel

• Understand and manage the most common data analysis techniques in marketing research: forecasts and customer segmentation
• Spreadsheet application and advanced spreadsheet outputs

Business Policy

• Learn how to apply an array of analytical models to evaluate corporate and business strategies in the fashion and luxury industry, and their impact on creating and sustaining competitive advantage
• Critically discuss business cases, examining both qualitative and quantitative information and drawing relevant conclusions about the related managerial implications
• Learn and apply basic economic rules for information, experience, and symbolic goods
• Perform a simple industry analysis using segmentation and competitive positioning, while assessing the main drivers for value creation and value appropriation
• Evaluate the portfolio of resources and capabilities of a company
• Identify differentiation drivers and isolating mechanisms i.e. barriers to imitation
• Perform a value chain analysis, assessing advantages and disadvantages of vertical integration
• Read, discuss, and draft articulated business plans.

People Management

• Understand the challenges and the people-management skills you need within a creative business at the different stages of your career.
• Explore the role you tend to play when you interact and work with others and how you tend to contribute to the organizational success.
• Learn how to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your boss, even when you “hate” him/her.
• Experience tactics for collaborating with your peers in teams and for fostering creativity.
• Discover feedback as a tool for effective people management.

Sales Management

• Understand the role and the strategic evolution of sales processes and salespeople in wholesale channels
• Sales force organization and management fundamentals
• Sales planning & key account management in the wholesales channels

Business Planning

• Learn how to plan a new venture through a step-by-step approach
• Understand key metrics in a fashion start-up
• Learn about MVP validation techniques
• Learn how to prepare an investor pitch deck / business plan
• Learn about entrepreneurial management techniques

The MAFED promotes the MAFED Incubator, to give you the opportunity to turn your ideas into entrepreneurial initiatives in the fields of fashion, luxury, and design. In particular, the “Business Planning” course aims to give you an in-depth understanding of the qualitative and quantitative variables involved in working out and implementing a strategic idea in these businesses in a consistent way.

Applied Management Courses

Country Models in Fashion & Luxury

• Get familiar with the concept of country branding to understand the evolution of business models of the world’s leading companies
• Analyze the fashion pipeline to understand the source of fashion cycles
• Understand the evolution of business models in retail

Italian Excellence

The course provides you an overview of the drivers of Italian excellence in symbol-intensive industries. It is focused on their business dynamics, prevailing business models, and sources of competitive advantage. We will especially focus on the country of origin effect, namely Italian excellence, investigating how culture (i.e. history, traditions, arts, artisanship) might be considered one of the sources of distinctiveness of Italy’s most creative firms.

Managing Design-Based Companies

The course focuses on the management of creativity, innovation, and product development in design-based companies. This is not a course about design itself, but rather about the context in which design is used. The tacit skills of designers, their creativity, are vitally important, but only if combined with managerial skills and a deep understanding in the current economic environment. For design to be managed and championed effectively those responsible must be equipped with a broad vision of how design interacts within its changing economic, social, and technological context. So, the course:

• Provides you with an opportunity to consider design in the context of organizations, how design relates to different business functions in the new product development process.
• Enhances your ability to use design approaches and tools to identify and implement innovation and growth opportunities.
• Expands your thinking about corporate design and innovation beyond the design and development of new products to other fundamental sources of value creation.

Furniture Fair Workshop

• Introduction to the Salone del Mobile, Milan’s furniture fair
• Understand the main structural and operational characteristics of Italian design-based companies
• Understand the design-furniture industry by identifying different business models and business performance
• Understand the logistics behind the event of the furniture fair

Industry Analysis in Fashion & Luxury

• Learn about the main landmarks in the history of fashion, luxury, and costume, and how the greatest international designers, brands, and countries (Europe, U.S., Asia) influenced the current global fashion and luxury system
• Develop the appropriate language for the industry
• Understand fashion pipelines and how to segment the fashion and luxury system into sub-segments (women’s wear, men’s wear, sportswear, footwear, accessories, jewels, watches, cosmetics, etc.) and carry out a detailed industry analysis
• Understand product and process innovation in fashion
• Understand the main business logics and business models in fashion

Managing Symbol-Intensive Companies

• Improve competitive intelligence techniques, and apply industry-specific drivers such as stylistic identity, price/creativity ranges, and fashion/service content
• Understand symbol-intensive brand identity analysis, evaluate internal consistency and external relevance in product, retail, and communication brand positioning
• Evaluate symbolic brand equity content and its potential for extension into new product categories (line and brand extension)
• Understand turnaround and re-branding strategies in fashion

Design Fundamentals and Trends

• Understand the dynamics that generate new trends in design
• Set a new vision of design

Supply Chain Management

• Understand different operations models and supply chain structures in the fashion industry
• Learn basics of operations processes (macro-process from customer demand forecasting to finished product production and assembly) and operations techniques
• Learn basics of purchasing management

Product Design in Fashion (Merchandising 1)

Understand and learn how to plan seasonal product design (PD) and development process: activities, critical aspects, links between PD and other processes (segmentation, positioning, operations, logistics, etc.)

Communication Management

• Learn how to develop a communication plan
• Understand activities, roles, and timing in a communications office
• Explore the evolution of competitive landscape in digital media
• Understand how to prepare for advertising campaigns and how to design a disruptive communication strategy
• Develop the capacity to evaluate media plan options
• Learn how to give a communication brief and work with external agencies
• Understand critical success factors for video making
• Learn how to use influencer marketing