From Fashion Forecasting to Final Exams

“A lot of people at the time asked me ‘oh do you want to go into teaching?’ and at that point, I was like ‘absolutely not. Never.’” Professor Eurydice Sanchez of LIM College wouldn’t have guessed where she would end up after her winding career path.

Sanchez's career path was an unexpected journey. After graduating from Berkeley with an English degree, she was offered a Public Relations position that came about from an internship at I. Magnin. At the last minute, she decided not to take the offer.

“I loved my internship. I loved everything I did there,” Sanchez says, “but at the very last minute I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted to spend the next few years of my life doing.”

With no plan in place after turning down the job, she moved to LA and began working retail, just as she had done before graduating college. She then spontaneously moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico with her mother, which helped set her career in motion. She worked for a high-end tabletop business—a place where celebrity interior decorators shopped.

Her boss, and then mentor, presented Sanchez with the question: “What do you really want to do with your life?”

She expressed her dream of moving to New York City and working in fashion, and then things really started to pick up for her. Her boss connected her with a friend, David Wolfe, who worked in trend forecasting, so she could gain insight on one aspect of the industry to determine what appealed to her. Sanchez learned about forecasting from someone who started one of the first forecasting services in fashion.

“I thought literally nothing would come from it,” says Sanchez. “It was really great meeting with him, but it is what it is.”

Little did she know that 6 months later she would be flying out to a trade show in Las Vegas to interview for a position at The Doneger Group. She was ultimately offered the job.

Sanchez explains, “It’s a crazy story but it just shows you that you never know where things are going to lead sometimes and a lot of it is through who you know.”

If her boss in Santa Fe hadn’t asked her about where she really wanted to be, Sanchez may not have been as inclined to enter the fashion industry. That interview, meant to be a starting point for Sanchez, ended up being a milestone in a 15+ year time frame.

A high point of her position as trend forecaster was working on brand launches because her input was considered in the shaping of the brand. It was rewarding to know that she was contributing to something that so many people would come across.

“I think the most gratifying experiences were when the trend/product that I worked on made it to the selling floor and exceeded sales expectations,” says Sanchez.

More fashion-related opportunities began popping up after her Las Vegas interview. Sanchez was working for a company that was bought out by WGSN, which is when she decided to stop working in trend forecasting.

“I was burnt out. I had wanted to get out for a while,” says Sanchez.

This prompted her to start working freelance for a beauty forecasting company in Paris after being recommended by her boss at The Doneger Group. Every job she has had was brought to her attention by a connection of hers.

A friend of Sanchez, Professor Amanda Hallay, invited her to speak to her classes multiple times about trend forecasting. Hallay told her that a freelance period is a perfect time to try out teaching, especially because LIM College is always looking for adjuncts. She explained that since she’s been in the industry for so long, she felt it was time for her to share her knowledge with those just starting out.

She enjoyed working with students in different capacities. A job opened up in her current department and she thought she wouldn't get it because of her lack of higher education teaching experience. Thankfully, she landed the position and has been teaching at LIM ever since, all the while freelancing.

Sanchez was interested in fashion school before deciding on Berkeley, but her love for fashion never diminished. Working in the industry gave her opportunities to travel and meet people that made work all the more entertaining. Her jobs at Kohl’s, JCPenney, The Doneger Group, and Stylesight regularly sent her to places in Europe, South America, and Asia for trade shows, to shop for samples, and to visit print houses with her coworkers.

“It’s about the relationships,” says Sanchez, “for me, it was always the people. Sometimes the people kept me at a job longer than I even wanted to do the job.”

“It’s about the relationships," says Sanchez, “for me, it was always the people. Sometimes the people kept me at a job longer than I even wanted to do the job.”

Now, working at LIM, Sanchez has taught Fashion Forecasting, Fashion History and Global Attire, First Year Experience, and all of the CARE courses. Additionally, she holds the position of Career Advisor for the Fashion Scholars. She loves working with students and passing on any helpful information she has. She has been able to see the fashion scene through the eyes of a younger generation by stories of their internship experiences— “my students teach me too,” she says.

Forecasting was a good career choice for Sanchez, as she is a self-proclaimed curious person that can get bored easily. Those that work in forecasting get to work with many other departments like marketing, visual merchandising, product development, and design.

Sanchez says, “I don’t think there was ever anything outside of forecasting that I would’ve been interested in. It really encompasses everything that I still am interested in, like research and writing.”

Sanchez explained that fashion was always engrained in her. Once she started working in fashion, she realized that a lot of what she did for leisure connected to things she would eventually do in her job, like “creating huge mood boards on her [my] wall in college,” she says.

Even though she was always interested in fashion, she didn’t know what jobs there were in fashion besides being a designer.

Her mother, Joan Cathy Weimer, refers to her as "a headstrong Capricorn. At the age of four, she informed me she would be making her own clothing decisions."

And with that newfound freedom, Sanchez had her very first fashion forecasting experience, complete with a Hawaiian shirt that featured clown buttons and paired with polyester houndstooth pants. Needless to say, the trend didn’t catch on. Even though her path took her through a few different jobs, where she ended up can be credited to her work ethic, dedication, and networking abilities in these positions.

“My mother says that when she was pregnant with me, she read Vogue and Bazaar hoping it would sink into me,” Sanchez says. “She swears that this is why I have always been interested in fashion.”

“[The publications] took me into a magical place of beauty and colorful elegance,” says Weimer. “I can't help but think that she was influenced from the start by that young mother's choice of reading material, read while dreaming of a better life, a world of greater beauty."

Fashion was truly a piece of Sanchez even before her life had begun.

*All images sourced from interviewee