Class of 2020 alumna Maddie Grabill, a fashion merchandising major with a minor in sustainable apparel and textile innovation, was featured on the UD Career Center blog in 2019 for her summer internship with a Ross Dress For Less buying office. Now she works as brand strategist for a small fashion company called Lobo Mau in Philadelphia. 

“Lobo Mau is a sustainable knitwear company that specializes in innovative textile design,” says Grabill. “We produce with local factories and silkscreen our original textiles in house with careful consideration of our social and environmental impact on the world. As the brand strategist, my main objective is to use marketing to drive business.” 

As a brand strategist and coordinator for a City of Philadelphia Zero Waste Partner company, Grabill says her duties focus on e-commerce growth, social media growth and effectively using sales and customer data to influence decisions for the brand.  “I run the Instagram account for our brand as well as the Instagram account for our store,” she says. “This allows me to use both my creative side and my analytical side.”

Additionally, Grabill designs, writes and sends out weekly emails to subscribers, along with a slew of analytical tasks. “I create monthly sales reports to help us understand how the business is doing and what customers are responding to,” she says. “I also create and analyze ads on both Facebook and Instagram to generate sales and try to understand consumer behavior.” 

Grabill observes how her UD coursework prepared her for her current role.  “My fashion merchandising degree taught me a lot about the business side of the industry and I apply my retail math skills regularly at my job,” she says. “The fashion merchandising major has such a wide variety of courses that I feel like my skills are really well-rounded and I can do a lot of things within the industry. Since we are a sustainable company, my minor comes into play, too; a lot of my courses required independent research so I now feel comfortable finding solutions and new ways to be innovative on my own.”

Her internship with Ross’s New York buying office also influenced her professional path because she was able to discover exactly what she wanted in her future career. “During that internship, I analyzed and interpreted key business issues by running and then evaluating reports,” she says. “I really liked the analytical side of being an assistant buyer intern, but I found out that I wanted to be able to be more creative as well.”

Grabill says if she could speak to herself as a UD intern, she would tell her to go easy on herself and learn to live with setbacks. 

“The biggest career lesson I learned during my time at UD and throughout different internships is to not be so hard on yourself when things don't go your way,” she says. “There have been multiple jobs and internships in the past that I was qualified for or thought that the interview went well only to have a negative outcome. When I was younger, it really devastated me. But it’s not the end of the world. Just because a position doesn't work out, does not mean that you're not great or not qualified. Everything is a learning experience and you have to take the positives from the negatives!”

Grabill offers even more advice to recent graduates and incoming seniors. “It's okay if your career is not starting out the way that you thought it would because life is crazy for everyone right now,” she says. “Apply for something you might not have in the past and reach out to your networks to see if anyone has any openings or could be a reference for you. I've been lucky that my network has led me to some freelance social media and marketing work in addition to my current position and I am just happy to have the opportunity to be doing things that I enjoy during such uncertain times.”

This blog post is written by our Division of Student Life student intern Olivia Schnefke.