Making up your dream job

Questionable career advice

I often get asked through the style analytics DMs how I got into fashion research or (more often) how the asker could get into this work themselves. And I always get a bit stuck on this question — not because I don’t have a million bits of advice and resources to share with people, but because my particular journey wasn’t a straight line to success. Instead, like with most career paths, it came about from of a collection of experiences and interests that fused together rather organically over time.

I do wish I was the kind of person who had one set pathway, one set career goal that I have been working towards since I was a teenager. But obviously, this isn’t the case for most people. One conversation that I found particularly enlightening on this topic was Alyssa Vingan’s podcast episode with Kristen Naiman. Kristen is the chief brand officer of the RealReal and worked a slew of seemingly unrelated (but in hindsight! very related!) jobs that led her to the position she is now. Her story demonstrates that you don’t need a set plan but instead need to listen to yourself, your interests, and give yourself enough time really develop in your career (instead of putting the expectation on yourself to land the dream job right out of college).

I am sure the students asking these questions to the faceless style analytics DMs would love a prescriptive 1-2-3 on getting their dream job in fashion research and forecasting. But, as is the reality, it is probably going to be a lot of bouncing around to different jobs, constantly attempting to upskill, and exploring what you genuinely like to do (and probably a lot of what you don’t like to do).

As with most career paths, I got to style analytics and “data driven fashion commentary” via a collection of experiences and interests that came about over time.

Tldr on my academic + career background; I studied a bachelor’s and master’s degree in neuroscience, picked up some programming and statistics skills which led me to being hired for a consumer and market research job out of university. After a particularly bad few months of only working with (boring? depressing?) finance clients back in 2023 (fintech: fine, proprietary trading: ugh, private equity: the 9th circle of hell), I asked myself what my *dream field* to do research would be: fashion!! But after being a little discouraged by the jobs in my city either not existing or requiring years of fashion experience or (frankly) applying and just not getting selected for interviews — I decided to just do the job that I wanted (consumer/market research in fashion) and post it on Instagram. No one asked for it, but this created: Style Analytics. Born May 5th, 2023.

So, in the end, you can always just do your dream job for free.

Privileges include: disposable time and (in my case) a technical but flexible academic background.

Maybe that is bad advice, but I feel so (so) privileged to be living in a time with social media. It’s bad in many ways — completely! Totally! But it also has the ability to bring you closer to your dreams and interests. You can look for advice, post about your interests/hobbies/career, and (sometimes) even monetise them. While I’m not there just yet (I still work a 9-5 in advertising, style analytics is just a hobby) being allowed to share and be recognised for something I am passionate about is such a cool position to be in.

Sometimes you just have to do the job - even if no one has hired you yet (Working Girl, 1988)

Now for the deeper rundown and answering the questions from my career q&a post on IG a few weeks ago. Also to note: this isn’t prescriptive advice but more so sharing my experiences, the resources that helped a ton, and what I think would help you land a job in consumer/market research (more experience) or fashion trend forecasting and research (less experience).

How did you learn to program / how can I learn to program?

The short version: I was forced into it and I probably would have given up if it wasn’t an absolute requirement for getting my master’s degree (I hated it!). I failed my first R programming midterm and worked my ass off for a less-than-ideal 6/10 on that first course. The second required programming course was more focused on you building projects in your own time, and the satisfaction I felt from suffering through error after error while making a terminal blackjack game (cringe) — honestly I had never felt so proud of myself than when that game finally worked. And after realising that programming was rarely done in a timed exam setting (like it was in my first course) I slowly began to enjoy it more and more, really getting into the flow when writing code and being so proud of myself when a program/app/analysis finally worked.

Now, if you are in the position of not having programming shoved down your throat in a hostile and competitive academic setting, I would recommend datacamp. This was really a great supplement to the courses I was already taking through my degree and I still use the skills and tricks I learned through that platform (not sponsored, I wish).

I want the same career path as you…

After my degree, I got a job as a web analyst at ux design agency. After managing google analytics / tag manger set-ups and implementing the most basic of looker and tableau dashboards, I realised I could do more advanced analytics if I pulled the data from the google api and into R. With my psychology/neuroscience background I could better explain audience personas, why people were acting the way they were on our websites, and how we could meet their needs through our websites (or “digital experiences” as I called them at the time, I really drank the koolaid at that company). My boss at the time really loved this approach and asked me to expand our data-driven understanding of consumers to identify potential audience needs, wants, and barriers at the start of projects — so we could design better websites from the outset, rather than relying on data only to improve existing ones. This led to a lateral move from web analyst to a consumer research position, using (yes) a lot of website data from the google analytics, but also getting into more web scraping and natural language processing/analytics on reddit, instagram, and twitter.

For example: some of the early applications of this was scraping reddit to understand what questions and concerns people had about microbial meat products before we built the website, so we could ensure that these questions/concerns were answered as soon as they landed on our homepage. In a later project, I scraped reddit and instagram comments to understand how new parents were using baby carriers and in what occasions, to inform an advertising campaign for a baby carrier brand.

Along the way, I had the flexibility to self study, reading textbooks like Market Research in Practice, How to Research Trends, and taking courses like the Trend Forecasting Masterclass from Future Laboratory (all of which I would highly recommend). This combined with being asked broad qualitative questions by both my boss and our clients about our potential audiences led me to developing a suite of research methodologies that I now use both in my new job in advertising and also with style analytics. (I put together an ebook containing a lot of these methodologies, if anyone is interested)

… but how do I get started?

That’s hard to say. If I had to start over with no job I would say to take some data analytics and statistics courses via datacamp, and develop portfolio-ready research projects in your free time that interest you, building up that portfolio (that you could post online as well! github, instagram, substack will make it so much easier to share with potential employers) until you have some great projects to show potential jobs within market and consumer research. And if you haven’t gone to university just yet, I would suggest making a marketing (or any related) degree as technical as possible (stem skills are harder to learn but a bit more impressive on any resume).

For the people asking this question specifically for advice on how to get into fashion: I don’t really have a clear answer. In my 9-5, I get to work on fun consumer brands like F1, Tinder, and Heineken, but none of my clients relate to fashion (at least not yet). That said, running style analytics and setting aside time for freelance research and consulting has helped me build a portfolio of fashion-focused consumer, market, and cultural research projects. I might eventually use that work to apply for a role at a fashion brand — if I ever decide to go that route. But for now: I really enjoy my job in advertising in combination with running style analytics. Working outside of fashion lets me research and think about people, behaviour, and culture more broadly, which lets me bring a bigger-picture approach to the fashion research I do.

Hopefully that makes sense! And I hope that it gives some more insight into my particular journey and some resources to get you started :)