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A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics


Sustainable at all stages: changing the fashion industry

Published by Mark Bodnar

Cover of ebook: "Designing Fashion's Future: present practice and tactics for sustainable change"
A couple years ago I collaborated with our Interactive Arts & Technology Librarian on a series of posts about one of the "wicked problems" of our modern world: sustainability in the textile & fashion industries.

Green line drawing of clothing hanging on a laundry line
That series was published to support an interdisciplinary cohort of students in our Business of Design program, all of whom were working on projects to change the way fashion and its materials are designed, produced, purchased, and discarded... change of the sort that our world so desperately needs.

The word "change" is key here. The Business of Design program has changed to Make Change Studio, but the students involved are still trying to change the world, and they've returned to the topic of fixing fast fashion.

<Read on for an update and expansion of the original posts on fixing fast fashion!>

SimplyAnalytics: When only local market info will quench your thirst

Published by Mark Bodnar

line drawing of a person on a desert island
"Water, water everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink"

It's rare that we get a chance to quote poetry here in the BUEC Buzz, let alone a 185-year-old poem by a master like Samuel Coleridge... but this line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is oddly apropos of the frustration involved in trying to research a local market in our information age.  

We are all awash in information, so it can seem like doing good market research requires just a Google search or two — a quick dip with a cup over the side of the boat...

<Read on to learn about the thirst-quenching benefits of SimplyAnalytics!>

Useful little boxes: The power of psychographic clusters

Published by Mark Bodnar

line drawing of a head with a box inserted, combined with another drawing of a pencil ticking off a box
We are all so much more than our age, income, opinions, or shopping habits... right?  Certainly we can't be dropped into simple boxes like that and expect to have much in common with our box-mates...

But what if you change the "or" of my first sentence into an "and"?   

My middle-aged, middle-income, ethnically diverse, and environmentally conscious household-with-teens is probably more similar to other households that tick all of those boxes than it is to a random Canadian household. [...]

This argument is at the root of the concept of psychographic clusters...  

<Read on to learn about the power of Prizm5 & our SimplyAnalytics database!>