I’ve been focusing a lot on my project and made great progress. I’m dividing my proposal into a 3-phase strategy combining organic content, influencer partnerships, and digital clienteling on social media. I believe I have great data from research and articles I found to support my ideas. I also finished my first draft and presented it to my mentor, George, and he was very impressed. He suggested I work on reorganizing my data to build a stronger structure to support my claims. I even sent a copy to my former Stetson professor, Todd Haderlie — we had a Digital Marketing class last fall and he was one of the best professors I had during my time at Stetson. I thought he’d be a great person to give me feedback, and he was super open to it. Now I’m excited to see what he has to say! Hopefully, I’ll know the answer by the next post kkkkk

I’m currently working on the visuals for my presentation. I want to combine classic COACH elements and give them a different purpose. For example, I used Illustrator and Photoshop to transform a COACH Hangtag Bag Charm into an element for my presentation that I’ll use to display the title of the first slide. I’m playing with the brand’s aesthetic and recreating elements to make my deck interesting, fun, and creative.

One problem I’m having is that I wanted to do a survey with Gen Z COACH customers. I posted a survey on the COACH community on Reddit, but it kept getting deleted. Now I’m banned from the platform for 3 days. I wanted to get more insights on how the target audience perceives the brand’s social media. I got 15 responses in the few hours it was live before being taken down. I’m trying to find different ways to get more responses, but I feel like my options are very limited, unfortunately.

I really want to give the BEST impression EVER! They just told us that the presentation will be recorded so the President and Vice President can watch it later. They wanted to be there, but they’ll be in Europe the week of the presentation. As an international student, opportunities like this don’t happen twice.

Last week, I mentioned that we had a visit from the woman in Talent Acquisition, and that I asked her about opportunities for international students. She said there are some, however, due to the current U.S. administration, they’re changing the policies around visa sponsorship. She told me they still offer it, but you have to prove that you’re THE BEST at what you do, and why you can do it better than a citizen. That added a whole new layer of pressure on my shoulders. That information is not new to me — we learn this the moment we step into this country — but hearing it from her made it more real.

Since then, I’ve been focused on giving EVERYTHING I can to this project. More than 100% of me. I want it to be perfect, strategic, creative, to show my abilities and my personality. And although staying in the U.S. was never my top life plan, I really fell in love with the brand and with the retail industry. So, if I want to have more opportunities with COACH in the future… I better leave a good impression!