LCF Designing Tomorrow: the podcast amplifying young women in fashion business

As a student of our MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation course, you learn by doing. On this course at London College of Fashion, UAL, teaching is delivered through bootcamps, workshops, innovation labs, team coaching sessions, and hands-on team projects. One of these collaborative projects nurtured ‘LCF Designing Tomorrow’, the podcast amplifying the voices of entrepreneurial women at the beginning of their exciting careers.

“It’s a podcast for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. It’s a how-to guide: how to start, how to pitch, how to get funding, how to build community,” - Amayo Duke, MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation, one of the three students tasked with this brief.

When Duke and her project collaborators Kanishka Singh and Anqi Wen were tasked with creating a podcast, they looked to their course peers for inspiration. They discovered a gaping blank in the fashion innovation space, one that should be occupied by young women in business. Six episodes later, the podcast team have remedied this absence with candid conversations from a carefully curated roster of guests – each one walking aspiring entrepreneurs through a different phase in their businesses’ development.

As women of different cultural backgrounds, the student’s decision to focus this guide on the experience and wisdom of London’s diverse community of female entrepreneurs was a no-brainer.

“You can find a lot of male founders talking about their experience, but we wanted to talk to women who would be very honest about how they got to where they are.” - Amayo Duke

Just like it says on the tin, this podcast is more concerned with tomorrow’s innovators, rather than those whose story has already been told.

“It was really important to have the experience of someone who is starting while they're still juggling their studies, just like Tiffany Ho,” Duke says.

In an episode on how to start, the podcast’s team sat down with Central Saint Martin’s Tiffany Ho. Now a third-year student, Ho is the founder of UAL’s Creative Entrepeneur Society, which garnered over 400 members within the first month of its conception.

Other guests include Emma Garner from accessories imprint Isla de Gar, Chamiah Dewey from Dewey Clothing, the label designed to be inclusive for people under five foot, and adaptive fashion designer Hanan Tantush. Each guest was bought on according to their strengths and the episode’s focus, whether that be branding, sustainability, or work-life balance.

“The podcast’s episodes go from how to start all the way to beyond the business: how to have a personal life, and what’s next,”- Kanishka Singh.

The podcast was wrapped up with a live last episode in front of an audience at LCF’s East Bank campus on 23 May. With a panel of returning and new guests, along with a few alumni, this sustainability-focused event offered an apt ending to the podcast’s narrative.

All students on the MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation course were given a project to work on, but LCF Designing Tomorrow was the only to be founded by this year’s cohort. Other students were tasked with continuing legacy projects conceived by previous students, and next year the podcast will join this line up. Although this podcast has been handed over to the capable hands of their successors, the team are still dedicated to filling this gap in the fashion sphere.

“When you listen to podcasts normally, they’re talking to people who have already made it and are at their high point of their careers. But I want to talk to female entrepreneurs who haven’t done that yet. We’re really excited to see where this project will go next year. Even if we won’t be continuing the podcast, I’m going to pursue building this community.” - Amayo Duke

Written by LCF Newsroom Content Creator, Mimi Francis-Mearns, BA (Hons) Fashion Journalism and Content Creation.