What type of degrees are most relevant to footwear design? why?
AFAIK there are only two places you can actually study for a proper footwear degree (plenty of courses that aren’t degrees though,that are very good)- I studied one - the advantages are - being able to cut your own patterns and to easily be able to alter things in a factory, being able to make shoes from scratch yourself, grade patterns into sizes and widths, understand leather and how to handle it to make shoes,do your own costings and write your own specs. Other ID degrees teach you to be creative - but not the shoe stuff - needing to know the shoe stuff before you graduate, depends on where you are planning to work - if it’s at a big sports brand there are a whole load of flunkies to do all the technical stuff for you, but in other places they may expect you to at least be able to amend paper patterns, write your own last specs etc.
2) What salary can a student expect to make coming out of school (going into footwear design)?
It depends - I started on the UK minimum wage - which s quite common and still is, until you start getting bestsellers, you don’t earn the big bucks.
Can students with bachelors degrees expect to make more money than students with an associate degree( once again, going into footwear design)?
I don’t know the difference, sorry, in the UK all the degrees seemed to be batchelors.
What are the market regions in the U.S?
I’m in the UK, I don’t know this
What is the market calendar?
What do you mean by this? I’ve not heard the term before.
What type of degrees are most relevant to footwear design? why?
In athletic footwear you typically need a degree in industrial or product design. It teaches you basic problem solving that can be applied to the design of any product. You also learn a lot about tooling, injection molding, and different manufacturing processes. Not to mention how to visually communicate your ideas (render). Very few people here do not have a degree in ID.
What salary can a student expect to make coming out of school (going into footwear design)?
Varies greatly. In the Us you can expect mid $30k to mid $40k depending on how good you are and what internships you have had.
Can students with bachelors degrees expect to make more money than students with an associate degree( once again, going into footwear design)?
Students with associates can expect to not have a job… you need a 4 year degree.
What are the market regions in the U.S?
Not sure what you mean or how this applies. Design is pretty centralized and products are for national distribution if not global.
What is the market calendar?
Most companies have a 3 or 4 season calendar and design and develop products over 12 - 18 month schedule preceding the launch date.
Good questions. Good luck with the paper. Are you doing it on footwear design or the industry?
Yo/Shoenista:
Thank you very much for you time and effort. It’s greatly appreciated…to tell the truth, I really don’t know what this paper is for. we were just asked to do it. It doesn’t really make sense to me…these are questions we should have answered a long time ago…not in our senior year ( I’m studying accessories design at Fashion institute of technology by the way) but whatever.
I can’t wait to show my teacher these answers because I knew that most of the stuff he said about the industry was wrong…at least for athletic footwear…fashion footwear is a whole different category.
Read your post and saw that you are a FIT senior student…I am actually waiting to hear back from them (for the accessories design degree). Would like to chat to get your feedback on your experience.