NYU Stern’s one-year MBA in luxury is changing: after a five-year stint as the ‘Fashion and Luxury’ MBA, it has been refreshed and given the new name of NYU Stern Luxury & Retail MBA. Stern is rolling out updates for the one-year program – promising to put its wildly-popular experiential learning firmly at the front and center, to rebrand in order to better reflect program content, and to imbue its curriculum with ever more industry contact.
What Prompted These Changes?
The industries with which Stern students interact over the course of their MBA in luxury are far-reaching. From apparel to automotives, beauty to big box retail, fine wine to real estate, Stern embeds its students in professional networks across the luxury sector.
When designing the new program updates, Stern engaged in rigorous discussions with leaders from these very same industries – many of whom were Stern alumni themselves. Armed with their insights, Stern reached the conclusion that their program name could better reflect this wide variety of sectors with which they collaborated.
And so, the new name of ‘NYU Stern Luxury & Retail MBA’ was born, a name that more accurately describes the educational experience of the MBA and better encompasses the huge variety of employers who look to hire Stern students.
“Employers have a demand for MBA graduates who bring skills to commercialize their businesses as they navigate modern-day challenges and disruptions,” Professor Thomaï Serdari, the Academic Director for the Luxury & Retail MBA Program, says. “In other words, they seek out MBA talent that excels at the intersection of business and technology and who are fluent in retail. This is exactly the type of educational experience we deliver in our one-year immersive MBA program, and we’re the only U.S. business school with a dedicated MBA in luxury and retail.”
Stern’s Firm Grip On Real World Relationships
For many students flocking to Stern’s one-year MBA in luxury and retail, the program’s focus on experiential learning has long been a decisive factor in their choice of school. From regular company visits to European industry immersions, students are presented with no end of opportunities to put their theory into practice and get to grips with the mechanisms of real world luxury business.
This concept has been central to the program’s refresh, and it has been bolstered by three new initiatives – each investing more in the student to real world connection, and each aiming to build mutually beneficial relationships between Luxury & Retail MBA students, alumni, and top-tier brand partners.
The three initiatives are as follows:
- Luxury & Retail Alumni in Residence: This initiative posits Stern alumni as ‘insiders’ in the Luxury & Retail industries and promises exclusive, one-on-one access to them for students. Nineteen alumni have already signed up to participate.
- Luxury & Retail Council: Senior executives from big-name companies such as Google, L’Oréal and Westfield World Trade Center have committed to developing the next generation of talent. How will they do this? By mentoring students from Stern!
- Luxury & Retail Partners: Immersive experiential projects at Stern will now be sponsored by top-tier brands worldwide. Included on the list are L’Oréal, Ferragamo, Tivoli Group, St. John Knits, Spring Studios, Matouk, and Simon Pearce, all keen to get involved and gain early access to the talented MBA students at Stern.
Since its inception, the Stern program has professed to give students the opportunity to gain first-hand insight into the operations of the luxury industry, and to gain demonstrable, real world evidence of their commitment to a business career in the same sector. Not only that, but the program allows students to achieve all of this in just one year. There’s no sign of this changing in the new and updated program, with project-based learning and real-world connections still at the center of what the NYU Stern Luxury & Retail MBA does best.
