Design course provides multidisciplinary skills through producing Kendra Scott jewelry

In the sparkling, bright flagship Kendra Scott store on South Congress, a party on Feb. 6 celebrated the launch of the Murphy stud earring. A select group of five students from the fall 2022 semester designed the earrings — a group who completely revamped their creation near the end of the course after their initial product launch brief fell short.

The Accessory Design, Development and Merchandising course offers a collaborative case study with Kendra Scott that allows students the chance to design and produce a new jewelry piece for the brand. The class, open to all majors, divides students into a handful of small groups that design a line of jewelry before a Kendra Scott board approves one final design. By the semester’s end, the public votes online for their favorite of the class, deciding which design is ultimately produced by Kendra Scott.

“I loved it and felt really empowered because this course embraced that everyone came from different disciplines,” said Catherine Perry, a class of 2023 chemistry major and one of the designers. “They said, ‘We know you’re not all design majors here, but each of you has specific strengths and skill sets that can reimagine and develop products in new ways, and we’re going to show you how to do it and let you go from there.’”

Perry said the course offered her personal insight into her love for collaborative work. This led her to seek a job offering a similar collaborative environment after graduation. However, the group struggled before their design was chosen, as they had to develop a new product design following an initially unsuccessful launch brief. Their professor told them their initial design plans needed to be further tied to their program’s objectives before being presented to the board.

“Sometimes it’s really easy to take (starting over) as a personal rejection, but we learned over time that, ‘We’re just starting over, and that’s okay,’” Perry said. “Our best results came after starting over from square one, and once we embraced that, we ended up producing our best work.”

The course’s professor, Jessica Ciarla, said the collaboration and feedback the course offers by working in partnership with the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute provides students with firsthand experience in the design industry in a way no other course offers.

“As a professor who used to work in the (fashion) industry and own my own fashion design company, I saw there was a gap in terms of what you were learning in the classroom versus what was actually practiced in the industry,” Ciarla said. “This course wouldn’t work without the partnership with Kendra Scott, because it makes it a real-life case study. (The company is) very generous and philanthropic.”

With the partnership and their own hands-on work, students learn about customer research, data collection, jewelry design and new technology. They also visit the Kendra Scott Design Lab and distribution center, hearing from brand officials in order to better understand the industry through the lens of Kendra Scott values.

“I loved how experiential the course was,” another designer, 2023 business administration graduate Julia Hathaway, said. “It was fantastic to listen to (Kendra Scott officials), learn from their knowledge, and then be able to take their knowledge and apply it to what we were doing. It was very beneficial and skill-building … I’m very grateful to have had an experience like this at UT.”