Fashion@Brown with Celia Heath: Championing Female Empowerment

Welcome to our fourth installment of Small Talk with WIB! I was lucky enough to be joined by Celia Heath, the head of business and co-vice president of Fashion@Brown. Fashion@Brown puts on runway shows and hosts speaker series, as they work to bring fashion to the Brown community. 

Celia’s path to F@B was not exactly straightforward. She thought she wanted to study finance coming in, but after sitting in large lecture classes where she felt like she could learn all this from a textbook, she switched her major to literary arts and decided to fulfill her passion for business by joining F@B’s business team. This was the perfect fit for Celia, where she could, as she says,  “apply business skills I had learned [in classes] to an area that I love.” Describing the business team as a “wonderful community,” Celia loved F@B, so she applied and became the co-vice president. With a female president and female co-VP, F@B is led by an “empowering group” of women. 

On the business team, Celia is in charge of managing the budget. She is currently leading work to petition UFB for more funding, a project that she says gave her “insight into the difficulties of raising money.” She also helps F@B establish sponsorships with different brands, where a company gives F@B money or goody bags and F@B advertises them in return. Celia smiles, as she remembers getting DVF goody bags last year for F@B’s runway show. “It was so cool,” she says. Being on the business team has helped her “learn what it actually means to run an organization,” noting that it is so much more than just money and finances. Through the F@B business team, Celia has learned how to network, cold email and cold call people, spread awareness of brands, and come up with ideas and execute them. Her experience has shown her that “business is so much of the fashion industry,” as it’s all about building a brand. 

Celia describes her time on the business team as helping her in an internship she did with Public Habit, a sustainable fashion startup. Because designers design clothes around a year in advance of releasing them, clothes are created in bulk so that almost ⅓ of clothes in the industry go to waste, creating lots of pollution and contamination. Public Habit doesn’t produce the clothes until a customer orders them, and Celia felt inspired by working there in combining her interests in sustainability and fashion. She also witness first-hand “the struggles of starting a fashion brand,” and watched as employees make decks and created pitches for potential investors. While sustainable fashion is definitely on Celia’s list for after Brown, so is design, marketing, other forms of business within fashion, being a talent agent, and more. “F@B opened my eyes to all of the things that are out there” in the fashion industry, she says. 

Finally, Celia has some empowering words of wisdom for young girls looking at business. She describes how F@B gave her confidence, as it is “run by some bomb girls” and really “embodies female empowerment.” As a freshman, Celia had personal experience feeling intimidated in larger male-dominated Econ classes at Brown, and says she felt like “nothing I have to say is worth it.” Discouraged, Celia stopped speaking up in class. But now, she has gained confidence through the business team at F@B. Running a business is about networking, and social and emotional intelligence, she notes, and women actually often have a leg up in those skills over men. She encourages other young women to “be confident in yourself,” and “don’t let [anyone] tear you down.”