How LIM Helped Me "Find" Licensing—and Why It’s a Smart Path for Fashion Majors

At LIM College, where I earned an MPS in The Business of Fashion with a concentration in Business, I finally found language for what I’d felt back home. Retail math and P&L discipline put numbers to my instincts. Case studies on intellectual property and licensing revealed the quiet engine behind so many products I admired. I started asking new questions—Who owns this character? What does “rights-safe” really mean from sketch to shelf? How do you protect brand equity when retail moves at the speed of social? Somewhere between a licensing practicum and a negotiation exercise, it clicked—LIM is where I found licensing. It wasn’t a detour from design; it was the system that lets design scale without losing its soul.

Today, I work in New York as a Brand Licensing Technologist at Isaac Morris Ltd., a role that reflects the hybrid I’ve built—part design thinker, part product strategist, part trend-savvy problem solver.

I translate creative intent into products that are compliant, on-brand, and retail-ready, while shaping clear, human-centered ways of working that make the whole process faster and more transparent. On a typical day, I might route art approvals for a global entertainment IP in the morning, dive into a royalty question over lunch, and craft an insight-driven brief in the afternoon to help our team anticipate what a retailer will want next season. The sketchbook never left me; it just widened into a blueprint.

Licensing lives at the intersection of imagination and accountability. It rewards taste and rigor. You protect the story and keep finding fresh ways to tell it—a hoodie, a hangtag, a homepage, a pop-up. My approach is design-led and data-literate: clearer briefs, structured checkpoints, and careful use of widely available, up-to-date tools to spot patterns and focus attention—always with human judgment in the loop. The aim is simple and public-facing: clarity and speed for partners, rights-safe product for fans, and more time for the creative work that makes both possible.

Shifting from hands-on design to the business side didn't mean leaving creativity behind; it elevated it. Early design experience helps me negotiate better because I can feel how a clause lands on a garment. My business education at LIM makes me a stronger partner to licensors and retailers because I understand how choices—placement, palette, packaging—roll up to equity and revenue. And staying up-to-date and trend-relevant means I don’t accept friction as fate. If a process is slow or opaque, I look for ways to simplify it, automate the repetitive parts responsibly, and put better information in creative people’s hands—without ever compromising confidentiality or the integrity of the brand.

LIM was the bridge. It gave me fluency—the language of IP, category management, and retail cadence—so I can sit with creatives, legal teams, merchants, and operations partners and get everyone moving in rhythm. It offered practice—projects that mirrored real approvals, real guardrails, real deadlines. Most importantly, it gave me the confidence to claim a lane that didn’t have a textbook title and to build playbooks that make licensing measurably better.

As someone who stays in touch with both current students and recent graduates to offer them guidance, I’m often asked if licensing is a smart path for fashion majors. Absolutely. It keeps you close to storytelling while operating at scale. It teaches the full business stack—law, finance, supply chain, marketing—so you’re resilient across roles and categories. It’s inherently global; you learn the logic of rights, territories, and channels that transfers to entertainment, sports, lifestyle, beauty, and beyond. And it measures impact clearly: sell-through, renewal rates, royalty accuracy. That combination is exactly why licensing is a smart path for fashion majors. Your wins are visible—and career-defining.

“From Mumbai to Manhattan—and beyond” is geography, but it’s also a horizon. Mumbai keeps my hustle honest and my taste grounded; Manhattan keeps my ambition global and my execution precise. The beyond is where I’m pushing next—expanding a design-first, up-to-date, trend-relevant toolkit to new categories and partners, advocating for cleaner and faster licensing systems, and championing artist-respecting, growth-oriented standards across the industry. Extraordinary ability isn’t a label you declare; it’s a responsibility you grow into. Mine is the ability to fuse design, business, and technology into licensing programs that are more compliant, more profitable, and more loved by fans. LIM helped me find that calling, gave me the tools to practice it, and set me on a path to scale it.