Student Success Story: From BDW to Product Designer at Trunk Club
By The Denver Egotist / /
A grad perspective from BDW alumnus Dan Nelson.
I currently work at Trunk Club, a men’s outfitting service in Chicago. In the simplest of explanations, we help guys look and dress awesome. When I started, the company was just over 100 people and we very much considered ourselves a start up. Hardly any tech product to show for. Now, just over a year later, we are closing in on 500 employees, opening several locations across the country, and have a suite of digital applications helping us scale to enormous levels. At Trunk Club I’m a Product Designer. I lead the product discovery and product development for our member experience, focusing on a highly personalized, mobile first strategy. This includes anything from prototyping and testing user experiences, conducting user research and interviews, to designing and developing our iOS app and web applications.
BDW was the perfect place to let me pause and focus on myself and my career ambitions. It absolutely helped me develop the skills I needed to thrive in a start up environment. But one thing for anyone looking at BDW to understand is that it’s not a place that’ll teach you everything but a place that’ll give you the time, flexibility, and resources to teach yourself anything. That requires motivation and a great deal of independence. BDW also doesn’t make you a designer. It makes you a better designer. Those that succeeded were those that already possessed a talent but needed a place to refine, hone, and explore that talent. They were committed, adventurous people who did more than the assigned coursework but dove deep into what got them excited.
The BDW Designer Founder Accelerator is a 50-week graduate program dedicated to redesigning learning for the realities of the 21st-century global economy. BDW is part of the ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado at Boulder. We take no more than twenty students annually and, from August to August, develop them into marketable talent that possesses a unique and relevant combination of design, research, engineering and marketing. They regularly land in the most innovative companies in the world or simply launch their own. Click here to apply.
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