Austin Community College Seeks to Spur Industry Growth with Fashion Incubator

Nina Means is a rising star in fashion design. She earned an international fashion degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, has studied in Florence, Italy, has designed for major brands, and has her own clothing brand called Nina Means. Now she has embarked on an even more challenging project: Director for the Austin Community College Fashion Incubator.

Nina Means

The College has one other incubator—in the biosciences—and the two will collaborate as well as operate independently of each other. More on that later. But based on the bioscience success, the City of Austin approached the College to explore the creation of a brand-new venture, the Fashion Incubator. Nina’s goal as Director is to lead the strategy and development of an instruction-centric fashion incubator, reaching students, emergent fashion designers, and the local industry. The City identified fashion as a major growth industry for the area. Austin, Tex., is probably not the first place you think of when considering the fashion industry; but Means notes that the fashion industry was responsible for $86 million in industry impact there in 2013, and there are more than 1,300 fashion jobs in the area, people that consider themselves actively engaged in fashion. However, it is highly fragmented, and another goal of this project would be to create synergy among those now-fragmented silos of industry influence through a space that serves as an anchor for a new industry.

To get the ball rolling, the City of Austin is helping with some of the infrastructure for the Incubator, located in the old Highland Mall, to the tune of some $300,000 plus in-kind services. The incubator is also benefiting from an academic lease contract that brings its monetary investment down to roughly $150,000 over three years, an amount that is covered by City of Austin Economic Development initiatives. As in many communities, this Austin mall fell on hard times, and the Fashion Incubator offers a version of retail resurrection that can provide a good model for other communities to follow. 

The project also attracted interest from a number of other sponsors, most notably Gerber Technology, who has agreed to provide some $13 million in state-of-the-art garment manufacturing equipment, software, training, and support. With this donation, the Fashion Incubator will be able to address the complete design-to-consumer cycle.

The project is looking to attract students, including through dual-credit programs with local high schools. Another aspect of the project will be continuing education for area fashion professionals, including training and certification in the industry’s latest technology. Means expects about 100 students in continuing education at any point in time, providing the base. She expects between 50 to 75 students participating in the program for credit starting in Fall 2019. Austin Community College

The final prong of the project—the basis of its name—is the incubation of up to 20 businesses that genuinely want to leverage the Incubator to scale themselves and that are positioned to develop higher-end products that will enable their businesses to be successful and profitable. The businesses will be located on-site and have access to both the school’s network of mentors and technology that reduces friction to market. Means anticipates that the incubator aspect will be like a 12- to 18-month boot camp, during which these businesses should have gone through at least three development cycles, as well as gained knowledge about operating a business, including finance, marketing, and other expertise that a successful business needs.

All participants will be working side-by-side with real industry veterans, and for students, the goal is to have them graduate with real-world skills, ready to jump into an industry job, including learning how to make a Tech Pack, the instruction set a designer provides to a manufacturer to actually produce the garments.

It's an ambitious project, with a soft launch that has already occurred and a grand opening planned for early 2019. Designers-in-residence will begin in January.

In terms of collaboration with the Bioscience Incubator, the parties are looking at what each offers and where there can be overlap. There is opportunity also for a co-residency between bioscience and fashion. To this end, they are seeking to work with tech and apparel brands like Under Armour, who have an Austin presence, and are willing to sponsor research fellowships.

As part of its real-world education and as an extra funding source, the Fashion Incubator will also offer sample making as a service for local businesses, who may not have the digital infrastructure for affordably creating samples.

It will be fascinating to follow the progress of this inspirational project. It accomplishes so many things: repurposing retail space that might otherwise just be an eyesore; providing students and industry professionals with the real-world skills they need to get jobs in an industry that is increasingly more automated and technical; and incubating businesses that can drive prosperity in the Austin area. Other U.S. cities should take note and follow suit!