What does it actually feel like to study the BA Fashion Business Management at the University of Westminster?
To find out, we looked beyond the course overview and explored what really defines the course experience.
Studying BA Fashion Business Management at Westminster isn’t theoretical. The course is built around live briefs with industry partners, which is where the work gets interesting.
One of these is a project with John Lewis & Partners, where students develop a new menswear collection and pitch it directly to the buyers. Here’s how it actually works.
Where fashion meets business thinking
At its core, BA Fashion Business Management is a four-year course that navigates the fast-paced world of fashion management at a global level. It’s not just about trends or aesthetics; it’s about strategic business knowledge with creative and commercial insights, branding, and how fashion companies operate in a competitive, rapidly changing market.
Key industry topics for this course include buying, merchandising, marketing, and supply chain management, helping students and future professionals develop analytical and creative skills required in the fashion industry.
A distinctive feature of this course is the one-year-long industry placement, which allows both domestic and international students to work full-time, offering invaluable experience with leading fashion and retail organisations, further broadening their job prospects and networks.
The course is guided by a teaching team with industry experience. The programme showcases guest speakers, live projects and industry collaborations. In our student-led conscious fashion space. Students engage in live projects with sustainable brands and community partners, gaining hands-on experience in branding, events, and visual merchandising while developing practical skills in responsible fashion practice.
Learning through real-world projects
One of the strongest aspects of the course is its focus on practical, industry-relevant work.
Rather than purely theoretical assignments, students take part in projects that reflect real challenges in the fashion world. An example of a previous project is where students worked with our industry partner, John Lewis, to develop their own new Menswear collection and propose it to the buyers. Students explored the customer profile, range planning & merchandising, market positioning and competitor set of the Industry partner, as well as suggested suitable marketing and branding propositions to ensure the success of the concept.
This consists of researching the current customer profile by going to the stores and conducting consumer and professional surveys to understand the current consumer demographic of the brand. Then, the students are assigned to find the gap in the market and highlight it through a market positioning map and create a new menswear collection to propose to the buyers.
The range collection is made through meticulous research on future trends through sources such as WGSN and Stylus, available for students to use through the university’s website. The range is then put into a range plan where students design their own range and use merchandising plans to showcase the financial and inventory numbers for the collection.
Marketing strategies are made by the students with the marketing timeline, proposal of fashion influencers who fit the brand aesthetic, promotional events, and visual merchandising for the offline retail space. It’s then presented as a brand bible to the John Lewis & Partners buyers to get feedback on how effective the new collection will be for the industry partner.
The Westminster difference: Skills you take with you
What’s useful about a brief like this isn’t the John Lewis name on the deck. It’s that you’ve had to defend your decisions to people who buy menswear for a living. You can’t hide behind theory when the person across the table has signed off on purchase orders for collections like the one you’re proposing.
By the end, you’ve got something more useful than a coursework grade: a project you can actually talk about in an interview, with evidence of how you got from consumer research to the final pitch. That’s the bit you can take with you after graduation.
