FASHION MADE: Academia and Industry Must Collaborate with Robert Meeder
In this interview, Robert Meeder, senior leader at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), explains how the school diverges from traditional research‑focused universities by prioritising industry‑ready graduates. He describes SCAD Pro, a dedicated division that creates short‑term, design‑thinking‑based collaborations with companies ranging from a 48‑hour ideation challenge to a 10‑week immersive program. Meeder cites concrete case studies, such as a financial‑literacy project for Commonwealth Bank targeting millennials in emerging markets, and a Disney‑commissioned capsule collection celebrating Mickey Mouse’s 90th anniversary, which involved 30 multidisciplinary students producing a full collection, campaign, video and launch event. He argues that fashion education must embed sustainability, circularity and digital 3D skills from the first year, contrasting this with traditional curricula that treat these topics as afterthoughts. Meeder highlights the industry’s digital skills deficit, the fragmentation of 3D software tools, and the resulting challenge for educators to keep curricula current. He proposes a three‑way partnership among academia, industry and government to overcome bureaucratic inertia and standardise core subjects such as sustainability and 3D design, using Hong Kong as a potential model. Throughout, he stresses the importance of real‑world projects for student engagement, the need for executive training in sustainability, and the broader shift toward solution‑oriented education that balances artistic craft with technological and environmental imperatives.
Chapters
I'm sitting here with Robert Media from SCAD. Robert, hey!
Hi! Hey, how's it going?
Yeah, very well, thank you. How are you?
Good.
Excellent. SCAD is an educational establishment of sorts, but it's not your traditional school, is it?
No, that's correct. So We are a little bit different because we're not your traditional research-based university. So whereas some universities put a lot of emphasis on the long-term research, we put a lot of emphasis on our students and making them industry ready. And so from our 4-year program or our 1 to 2-year MA or MFA program, we really try and build our students so that upon graduation they're either employed or they're close to being employed.
Do you develop the skill sets differently to other establishments?
It's a, it's a fully accredited university, but what we do quite differently is that we do have a lot of direct industry contact. And so from year one, we really are partnering and engaging with industry on problems, on ideation. We have a special division within SCAD called SCAD Pro that allows industry to engage with students where we can build up a 10-week unique program for the industry person, industry member themselves. Uh, and that can come down to a 5-week program that will be implemented in a preexisting course or can be a simple, uh, 48-hour challenge.
Okay.
And so with this, within these programs, we actually apply a lot of design thinking principles where, uh, we're not just pulling ideas out of thin air. We were looking at We're truly looking at it as a problem and how do we use design to solve these problems that industry are facing.
And it is facing a few issues.
Yes, of course, of course. One of the most recent projects I was involved with was with Commonwealth Bank and financial literacy. Now you wouldn't necessarily think that a design art school could actually solve problems of financial literacy. You would almost expect that they they should go to a business school. But it was precisely because we are a design and art school that we're able to provide unique insights and provide a different framework to how do we solve that problem. And so in this particular case, uh, the bank had just expanded into developing markets of Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Africa. And so the irony in all of this, their key clientele are millennials. So why wouldn't you want to work with millennials. Why would you then go to an agency who might only have one account manager and creative director and generate some ideas that may not even be appealing to your target audience? So in this case, we're able to work with the industry, work with your problems, but actually work with their target audience that is actually driving the solutions that they're, they're looking for.
That's quite interesting because obviously with you're educating that age group as well. So how do you balance the fashion industry or apparel industry, which has come from slightly archaic ways of working compared to other manufacturing industries, certainly in the manufacturing process, and sort of repurpose that and teach people and educate people in a way that suits their style? Yeah.
Interesting, interesting question. I think it's something we face on a daily basis. And really from actually today's early discussion on the panel, it really is evident we are at a crossroads, not only in consumers, you know, the millennials are moving through as the biggest consumer group right now in China versus in the West where the baby boomers are now retiring and dying off. And so If we see those changes in the consumer groups, we also see these changes in the industry. Industries needing to adapt themselves and adapt quickly. We too are also seeing that changes in education, both in the establishment and in where we need to go. And so there's almost, I almost like to say this, there's two camps of thinking. There's the traditional fashion educational universities that, you know, believe fashion should be something of beauty and, you know, craft and exquisite designs, which is true. But there's also another camp to say that if we had only taught ideas of sustainability to maybe generations before, some of the, some of the designers that are in key decision-making positions right now, we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in of waste. So, you know, new concepts of circularity, sustainability, this has to be core to the education and I believe has to be taught in year 1 as opposed to taught as maybe as an afterthought in their final year. And that's where you really find two different kind of viewpoints. And maybe these viewpoints can exist. Maybe you can do your traditional fashion education and universities can specialize in, in, in view— in truly more the couture type design, sure. But then also students and designers that enter the fast fashion landscape, those types of students need to realize the impact they're making to the industry. They need to realize and understand sustainability, circularity, usability. Yeah.
Yeah, it's kind of a form and function balancing scale.
Absolutely.
You know, and I guess those former, you know, I think those former things you're talking about with the beautiful artistic designs, I'm thinking of, you know, a nice pencil-drawn dress and trying to sort of create that.
Um, and that's a very good point because the, the, the artistic expression is still very important, but in this day and age, and, and, you know, it wasn't too long ago that I was, I was meeting with the creative team, the, the designer, the head creative designer, and the team of a— I won't mention the name— of a very internationally renowned sneaker brand. And they said that they struggle to find designers to fill the roles that they have. And they have gone to all the different design schools, all the different schools specializing in footwear, and they still can't find the right designers. At the end of the day, they're employing animation students and teaching them 6 to 12 months of fashion and having the type of talent that they require. And that's case in point that academia is not serving the purpose of generating talent that the industry requires without the industry needing to retrain or have additional training. So that also allows academia, allows academia to see it as an opportunity to say, this is the time in, in our life to actually maybe think outside the box and do, you know, cross-collaboration of schools. You know, maybe there is, and I believe there should be, a complete digital fashion education where you're not using the pen. Maybe you use the pen in year 1, but by year 4 when you graduate, you're— all your designs are completely rendered, 3D, animated. Products that don't need to be produced or prototyped because they're so realistic and sustainable at the same time, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Wow.
How are we going to get there then? I mean, I guess my question to you, Robert, is what are you going to do to help us get there? What am I going to do?
Well, I'm in the position I'm in precisely because of that. I mean, I came from industry and I've always been in and out of academia. My first engagement with— in academia was, was in needing to develop a course of fashion management. So I was working in Scandinavia and I had a lot of fashion students who wanted to get into PR and marketing, and I had a lot of business students wanting to work with the luxury brands that I was working with. And it was like a complete kind of missing link here because fashion students need to understand basic concepts of demand and supply, and business students need to understand basic ideas of aesthetics and design. And it was through my actual former professor that, that she inspired me to undertake a PhD and actually write one of Scandinavia's first fashion management course, which I did for the University of Borås. I taught it for about 8 years going back and forth, left academia, went back to industry, and now I've been back in academia where, you know, once again I've tried to shake things around and try to you know, get academia to look at it a little bit differently. There's a lot of work to be done. That's, that's all I can say. And it's not going to be maybe in just, you know, my lifetime. Maybe it's going to require a little bit more, or at least it's going to be an ongoing process.
Yeah, because this has come about because obviously, especially in the design side, you know, 3D designing footwear in this instance, you know, it's, it's come about so quickly.
Absolutely.
So I guess from an educational standpoint, it's been hard to catch up because it's harder to implement that in a school than it is in, you know, 100%.
And I would say that, you know, the role of how academia was perceived, let's say 10 to 15 years ago, you know, it was truly that academia was something that led industry, you know, industry went to academia for insights for future direction. A lot of academia has, I hate to say it, in part failed because industry is forced to work so quickly. Consumers are demanding more and faster that industry has internalized a lot of that R&D. Industry has invested in their own projects. Uh, it hasn't really helped in the sharing and collaboration, uh, across the industry. And so because of that, then in the past, maybe software would have gone after academia and it would have only been maybe 1 or 2 software players. Now they're going after industry. And so academia is an afterthought. And so my problem right now is that I've potentially got 4 different types of 3D rendering design programs. I can't teach 4 in, in one student's education. I can only teach 1. I would be lucky to get 2. And that's the problem as well, that every industry player will then use different softwares. So whose responsibility is that? Do we all agree that should be one software or then do we scale back or then do I have to then create 4 different programs that cater towards 4 different softwares? Or that's just a little example of, you know, how fast industry has developed, how everyone else has developed along with industry. But somehow academia has been just floating along by.
Yeah, and it's hard because, I mean, that costs a lot of money as well.
Absolutely.
And, you know, if you need 4, yeah, that's 4 times as much money as one brand. Absolutely. Yeah.
And then, yeah, and I can understand the industry's frustration when they're getting graduate talent who only know one program and all purposely might like one student, but then realize that they also got to invest in that. In that talent to take them further and take them forward.
So do you think that the onus should be on the brand to educate people in this, in this regard? Or I mean, if you were to pose a possible solution, because I don't— let's be honest, I don't think that we're going to cut down and these guys are going to all agree to cut their investors out and all agree just to use one.
Correct.
Design, 3D design tool or something like this, you know?
Absolutely. I think it's a— I almost want to say it's a three-way partnership. I think education obviously being one, industry being the other, and government and policy being the kind of the third. Academia, what we do in academia needs to be approved and governed by the educational bodies and boards of the various countries and governments. So it's not like we can independently go out and just start doing our own thing. And in some way, when you look at that combination, industry now has, has somehow overtaken government in its impact and influence in countries around the world. Right. We can agree on that. And because of that, that is the same thing applies in this particular discussion. How do we slow it down is really by bringing all three parties to the table and say, okay, listen, how, what can we do to, to ensure that we satisfy each other, that we are producing the talent that the industry requires, that the academia has the policy support from the government and approval, and at the same time that the industry is satisfied with both what the government and the academia are doing. I mean, I've always said Hong Kong for me is— I love Hong Kong, but, and it also could be a great case study in that Hong Kong wants to truly position itself as a hub or a center of fashion of some sort in the world. And it could essentially be the hub for sustainability for Asia. I mean, it's a self-contained nice little almost package, let's call it. There's not that many universities here. There's, you know, 4 or 5 institutes. It wouldn't be that hard for the government to actually put a policy that states all universities have to teach sustainability as a core subject from year 1 within fashion education. Or all universities need to teach 3D technology, 3D designing as a core component foundation subject within fashion education. And that will ensure then that all the institutional players are then revising their curriculum, but at least adapting the curriculum so that at the end of the day we can say, you know what, Hong Kong is the only country in the world that all students graduating from Hong Kong have sustainability at its heart and potentially producing sustainable collections, all of us, and to understand technology and software like no one else.
Yeah, that's not a barrier to entry, that's just a massive plus point, right?
You would think so, but this is where, this is where unfortunately bureaucracy, it really ties us back, and bureaucracy ties government back and academia back. And so whereas it might take months, years to, to, to do one curriculum change on a syllabi industry is already facing another problem that they're, they're needing to overcome.
So yeah, and so it's a thing, it's not training, you know, it's something a bit different.
Yeah, yeah. But like I said before, this idea that we're at this crossroads of change, you know, we're at this crossroads of consumer change, the Fourth Industrial Revolution that also requires that the, you know, the landscape in which we're working is changing, is changing. We're seeing more and more greater need for executive training. So now people who've been out in the industry for maybe 10, 15+ years, they don't really know what sustainability is. They never took sustainability as a subject in class because it wasn't something we spoke about. It wasn't even a topic, or even circularity. So we're seeing a greater need now to actually bring in industry people and, and, you know, develop programs for brands and for these people to reeducate them.
Yeah. Yeah. You were speaking on a panel earlier on today. Yeah. How did that go?
It was great. It was very interesting to have— so it was myself, Polly Yu, and Hong Kong Reader. And I think one of the key insights is for industry to see that universities were very open and were very willing and interested to collaborate. And I think in, in, in this day and age with the millennial cohort of students coming through, we realize that this particular group really likes to collaborate. They actually, they, they retain and they engage a lot more when there's a collaboration involved in the process. Um, but, but to realize that every institute has a different offering and we're not all the same. So whereas Maybe PolyU might work on a 12-month to 24-month lead on projects. Hong Kong Reader might be double that, up to 36 months. Whereas SCAD, we are anywhere between 10 weeks to our shortest collaboration with industry can be 48 hours. And that really is depending on the brand or the partner's requirements.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, how do you keep it that short?
Well, it comes down to their need as well. So basically our program, within our program, we have a special unit within SCAD called SCAD Pro. And so basically we have a 48-hour, we call it the 48-hour challenge, which is pure ideation. So brands might come to us and say, listen, I need 100 different ideas on gifts to give to my clients or you know, 100 different ideas on campaigns to develop for their marketing plans, just pure ideation through to the 5-week program, which can be plugged into preexisting coursework. And then it can be a fully sponsored 10-week program as well. So that is almost like a full class that are handpicked purposely to drive and develop solutions that the client is looking for.
Tell me about this Disney case study that you guys have been doing.
Yeah, that's a good one. So Disney came to us last year because it was Mickey's 90th anniversary. And so they basically, they had allocated budgets to do some sort of project, but they didn't know exactly what they wanted to do with it. But they needed— they did know that they needed to celebrate Mickey's 90th. And from our initial discussions with Disney, we were able to identify that we could create them a capsule collection designed by millennials for millennials with a full video photographic production behind it. So a lot of collaterals was developed along with a full-on launch event for press and celebrities here in Hong Kong. And so that was a full 10-week project, as I, as I mentioned before, uh, everywhere from the initial concepts of, of designing. And in that project, we had, uh, 30 students, so, and they came from all the different schools. So we had students from Fashion Design, Fashion Marketing, Branding Communication, Illustration, uh, Advertising. And we basically put them into groups, um, And so from week 1, where we just had the initial need of creating collection, down to week 10, where we exited the project with 16 full key looks, catalog, campaign, video, behind the scenes, an event. Um, yeah, very, very long, hard project. Yeah, but it was 2 and a half months, 30, 30 students.
Yeah, from all over, every different area.
Every different area also every different nationality. So when we know about these projects and we have enough ample lead time, because SCAD is uniquely positioned in the US, Lacoste eLearning in Hong Kong, we're able to actually promote the opportunity across the full program.
Amazing.
Yeah.
How did the students react to that?
They loved it. It was— they really, really enjoyed it. I mean, it was great for their portfolio, it was great case studies that they could talk about, and also, I mean, it was just the opportunity to work with a brand who needed something tangible, and it wasn't just a hypothetical, you know, idea of what it could be, as opposed to this is something that's going to go into production, this is something that the industry will be looking at and being inspired by, because you as a millennial designer, you made it. So, uh, yeah.
Do you feel like that would be a way to engage students way more than the hypothetical sort of 100 100%.
100%. And of course, it's a balance of both. I mean, you can't just collaborate and create without having a foundation of theory or historical reference or, you know, understanding of concept development. And so these projects generally that come through are crafted in a way that only students with high GPAs and also, you know, high grades can be invited to apply for it. So they need to have a good standing throughout their time at SCAD, and they, they get invited by the industry, they get invited by the professors that lead the project. And so that really matches their in-class experience, what they've been studying before, together then with the practical experience of applying what they know. Which is, to be honest, which I really think is in some sense is the future of fashion, or at least a part of education will be that. Yeah, outside of just your traditional theoretic— here's a textbook, here's research, study, hypothesize, write a thesis, graduate, good luck, go out into the universe.
Do you think that that applies actually, probably generally speaking, to education in general as well?
What the—
but applying that same sort of taking real-world experiences and applying it.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would hate— I think there's room for everybody in terms of academia, and I think there's room for your traditional research model university that would do the, you know, hypothesis and long-term theoretical research. Perfectly fine. But there is much more of a growing need for developing and delivering solutions and ideas to the industry now, but also for the students themselves to be engaged in real-life problems and developing solutions that make sense, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I feel like you want to go back to university.
I mean, do you know what, I feel like I should be doing a fashion design course because there's such a need for people. Yeah, you know, you hear it from the brand so much, there's a massive digital skills deficit in the industry right now. And yeah, you know, I think the more that guys and institutions like SCAD can do to help develop sort of curriculum and help address that deficit, the better, you know. And I think things like obviously the Disney Project obviously engages pupils in a great way. So, you know, I wish you good luck and I hope that you can get that bureaucracy challenge solved.
Thank you.
But good luck with that.
Thank you so much. And I think, you know, if there are ever, if there is, you know, industry listening or any, you know, industry members thinking, could I work with the university? How do I go about it? I would highly encourage, you know, everyone to collaborate. Naturally, it's— collaboration should be a win-win for all. It should be a win-win for industry, for academia, but most importantly, you know, for the students at the end of the day. So as long as we have this in mind and we keep it in our heart, I think, you know, everyone's going to be a winner in this particular situation.
Yeah, absolutely. Robert, thanks so very much for coming on the show.
No problem.
Thank you for having me.
Cheers.
