LCF launching fashion business Masters

London College of Fashion is launching a postgraduate course aimed at helping designer set up fashion businesses, as part of its newly founded Fashion Business School.

The MA Fashion Enterprise Creation course will provide a new route for fashion entrepreneurs to set up independent innovative fashion businesses, and help them develop and launch new viable fashion products.

The course has been developed from experience and expertise of the Centre for Fashion Enterprise, London’s pioneering business incubator that has been supporting emerging fashion talent over the past ten years, and is being aimed at industry professionals with significant work experience, as well as businesses from different fields operating within the fashion industry.

The specialist programme has a flexible nature, allowing students to run their own businesses alongside their studies and teaching is scheduled around the fashion calendar and the fashion industry selling cycles, to make it possible to complete the course alongside a career.

The course itself is aligned to mirror the challenges and opportunities that start-ups and early-stage businesses experience, and will use the students own businesses as case studies, whilst gaining and developing the knowledge and skills that will enable them to make informed and appropriate decisions in tough and competitive markets. It will be taught by highly respected industry professionals with significant fashion business and industry experience and the teaching will be tailored around the individual student’s business needs.

Another unique element of this course is the pay-as-you-go option, allowing students to take one or more units at a time in the order they prefer and can take up to five years to complete the Masters. In addition, all the course units are available as short courses, allowing for an individual or a company to benefit from support in specific areas such as production, business strategy or branding.

Wendy Malem, Dean of the graduate school and director for Centre for Fashion Enterprise said: "A unique opportunity to learn how to set up and develop a fashion business while actually doing it in tandem - is just what young entrepreneurs or designers really need to get started. Informed by the success of designers supported by Centre for Fashion Enterprise, this is a pioneering ‘flexible learning’ course based on inspiring Master Classes followed by professional coaching. There can be no better way to establish a viable business with expert support."

Applications for the course starting in October 2015 are now open.