Among the many honors and accolades the Stern School of Business has racked up, becoming the first business school with an MBA program dedicated to luxury and retail is one of them. Launched in 2018, the one-year Luxury and Retail MBA accepts around 25 students each year and provides them with hands-on learning at leading brands including L’Oréal, Ferragamo and St. John Knits.
For Stern Luxury and Retail MBA 2025-26 student ambassador Kate Thomson, the program’s industry focus and expanded career opportunities in a fashion-centric location are what drew her in. With a well-rounded curriculum including a Business core that builds fundamental knowledge, a Luxury & Retail Core which develops industry knowledge and Stern Solutions, in which students can interact with companies on business cases, Thomson saw the experience as a means to boost her business skills and connect her engineering background to the fashion space.
“I’ve always been personally drawn to fashion, anything related to beauty and design and just creating beauty, and I’ve just been kind of craving a way to marry that with my analytical side,” Thomson, who previously studied civil engineering at Vanderbilt University, said. “I started to form some connections between the work that I was doing and how it could be applied to the retail space, and learned about this program and decided to go for it, and it’s been amazing.”
The curriculum begins in May with business-intensive classes covering fundamentals such as accounting, finance, leadership and marketing for students without business experience to build their basic knowledge on the subjects.
By the fall, students can choose from one of five standard concentrations: Brand Management, Digital Marketing, Global Business, Luxury Marketing and Supply Chain Management and Global Sourcing. During this phase, they take industry-specific electives — for example, classes in the Luxury Marketing specialization include Innovation and Design and NextGen Fashion — designed to mirror real-world decision-making inside luxury and retail firms.
“Over the summer, we’re the main ones on campus at Stern and that’s when we take the core business school classes,” Thomson said. “Those are what traditional two-year MBAs would take over the course of their first year, so we’re cramming that into the summer semester effectively. That’s a very kind of regimented time where you’re in class essentially nine to five every day.”
A cornerstone of the program are “Stern Solutions” projects offered for credit each semester, which bring students and faculty together with industry-leading companies to solve business challenges in real time. The company-sponsored projects allow groups of three to five students to conduct research and analysis on a business’s challenges and craft custom solutions. Previous sponsors have included fashion corporations like Vogue, along with other corporations, including Google and Amazon.
Each year’s cohort also travels to Florence for a week during the winter semester, where they explore heritage and craftsmanship. The mandatory trip, not included in the students’ tuition costs, aims to expose students to creative elements of the fashion industry — in contrast to their analytics-focused classes —in an effort to demonstrate how fashion business practices differ globally. This year’s theme was centered on family-owned and small businesses, set in Florence due to Italy’s dominance in the luxury fashion world.
“Only in Italy will you find a family who’s been refining their craft since the medieval times,” student ambassador Matt Moskowitz said. “And they’re not concerned about making profits. It’s just something that no American company, or whatever other country that you’ve been exposed to and how they do business, could comprehend.”
During the week abroad, students moved through a packed schedule of company visits, factory tours and archival experiences that highlight the craftsmanship and long-term traditions embedded in Italian luxury production. From heritage fashion houses to textile recycling firms and hardware manufacturers supplying global brands, the site provides a broader view of how luxury goods are made and sustained across generations.
Students in the program also gain access to Stern’s extensive alumni network. Through the Luxury & Retail Alumni in Residence program, students are given a curated list of around 20 alumni to contact as a starting point for coffee chats and networking conversations. The alumni hold office hours every week, and students are also paired with experienced industry mentors in the luxury and retail space, who provide guidance throughout the program.
“One of my favorite parts that I love to talk about is the whole sense of community,” Moskowitz said. “This is a high caliber program, so I was like, ‘This is gonna be super cutthroat.’ Everyone loves to say how cutthroat the fashion industry is, so I imagined that this would follow suit. But everyone’s looking to help each other, which has been a very pleasant and unexpected finding of mine.”
Contact Saranya Mandapaty at [email protected].