How Curiosity Led Catherine Hayward to a Career in Brand Strategy

What made you choose Vogue College of Fashion for your studies?

I started out doing a Business Science degree at the University of Cape Town. The commercial thinking interested me, and about 18 months in, it was clear the rest of the degree wasn’t taking me toward the work I’m actually passionate about. I came to London still working out what I wanted to do.

I’ve always been interested in the business and commercial side of things, and there was a creative side of me I hadn’t had the chance to develop properly. Fashion had interested me for a long time, and before moving, I’d already started exploring it.

I did an online course through a New York university and a photography course in Cape Town, both of which introduced me to different parts of the creative industry and helped me see where my interests were starting to lie.

When I looked at degree options, Vogue College of Fashion stood out because of the breadth of the program. A lot of programs asked you to choose a discipline quite early: design, styling, journalism, buying. Vogue College covered communication, strategy, forecasting, image-making, and the commercial side of the industry.

That combination mattered enormously to me because I didn’t yet know where I wanted to specialize. The breadth is what led me to discover brand strategy, which I hadn’t considered as a career when I first applied.

The practical application was a big draw, too. The lecturers were actively working in the industry and brought real experience into what we were learning. There were also opportunities to hear from and meet people working across the industry, which helped a lot when I was trying to understand how it all worked beyond the classroom.

London itself was a big part of the decision. I wanted to be somewhere I could study and work in the industry while attending events, networking, meeting people, building a personal brand, and starting to understand the industry by being in it.

The location gave me access to opportunities I don’t think I’d have had elsewhere.

What were the most valuable skills you gained during the BA program?

Three skills have stayed with me.

Trend forecasting remains one of my favorite courses. It changed how I research and look at consumer behavior, and it taught me to see trends as evidence. A trend is usually a symptom of something bigger, changing in the way people live, spend, behave, or want to be perceived.

It taught me how to recognize patterns and then question them: what’s changing, why is it changing, and why now. That’s still how I work.

Brands jump onto something because it feels culturally relevant, without asking whether it makes any sense for them. Learning how to interrogate that is one of the most useful skills I took from the degree.

The second was the research itself. We had the time and the encouragement to go to exhibitions, sit in galleries, learn about artists, photographers, designers, and creative movements to properly understand the people and ideas that came before us.

You don’t realize what dedicated research time is worth until you’re working full-time. Once you’re in a job, curiosity becomes something you have to actively protect and make time for.

Nobody can hand you taste. You build it through looking, learning, and understanding why something works, where it came from, and what influenced it.

The third is the less glamorous one: software, Adobe and Readymag, mostly. Having every semester to keep learning new tools, refining those skills, and getting more confident making things counted for a lot. Being able to think something through strategically and then build or communicate it visually is now a huge part of how I work.

Can you describe a project or collaboration that had a significant impact on your learning experience?

My dissertation and final major project were the most formative parts of the degree.

Throughout my studies, I worked at Completedworks and I met a freelancer who also ran her own label. She’s from New Zealand, I’m South African, and we ended up having a lot of conversations about consumer behavior, branding, and what it actually takes for a young independent designer to break into a market like the U.K.

Those conversations became the starting point for my dissertation. I became very interested in how emerging designers enter new markets, the psychology behind how consumers perceive a brand, and how you build and market something commercially without losing what makes the designer distinctive.

That research then developed into my final major project, which became a live brief for her label. I created a repositioning and U.K. market-entry strategy covering positioning, tone of voice, visual identity, and pricing perception. I produced and directed two shoots, created a video campaign, built the wider marketing strategy, and developed the supporting brand and campaign assets.

There was a huge amount of research behind it, and I ran perception testing afterward to understand whether the repositioning had changed how people viewed and valued the brand.

What I loved was having a real product and a real founder to work with.

The decisions stopped being theoretical. I had to understand the person, the product, and translate that into something that could work commercially while still feeling completely authentic to her. She’s enormously talented, so building on her work made the project especially rewarding.

I was also mentored through the academic side of the project which helped me structure and challenge the project. Between that mentorship, the research, and having a real brand to apply everything to, that’s where I found the type of work I wanted to do.

The industry placement was another major part of my experience. I spent a summer at KCD London through London Fashion Week, working alongside other interns across accounts including Chloé, Burberry, Maison Margiela, Veronica Beard, and Diesel. It was completely different from university work and gave me a very fast introduction to how the industry operates day to day.

I also really valued the independence we were given during the program. The final exhibition was one of my favorite moments because you could see how differently everyone had interpreted the degree and where their interests had taken them.

No two projects looked the same, which said a lot about the breadth of the program.

How did the faculty and industry professionals influence your career path?

The lecturers were practitioners, which completely changes the kind of feedback you get.

They could tell you whether an idea would survive a client conversation, a budget, a production environment, or a room full of people who had already seen 100 versions of the same idea. That perspective is hard to get anywhere else.

Having access to people with years of real industry experience also meant having mentors who could challenge how you were thinking which was particularly important during my final project. I was pushed to make my thinking more specific, to understand why I was making an argument, and to be able to defend it properly.

I think that has stayed with me more than almost anything else. In brand strategy, you need the evidence behind your point of view and a clear reason for recommending one direction over another.

More broadly, I was very grateful for how generous the faculty were with their knowledge, feedback, introductions, and experience. They made the industry feel far more accessible, and they showed us that careers in fashion and the creative industries don’t have to follow a traditional or linear path.

How has your perspective on the fashion industry evolved since graduating?

The biggest thing is realizing you never finish learning the industry.

As a student, you naturally spend a lot of time looking at the big brands, the major campaigns, and the most visible parts of fashion. Since graduating, I’ve become much more interested in smaller independent brands, founders, and designers who are creating exceptional work and are still figuring out how to position, communicate, and commercialize it.

There are so many talented people whose work deserves attention. Creating a great product and knowing how to build a brand around it are completely different skills, and that gap is the part I find most interesting now.

I’ve also realized how much staying curious matters. The industry moves quickly, culturally, commercially, and technologically. You can’t become passive about research. You have to keep reading, looking, questioning your assumptions, and exposing yourself to things outside your immediate area of work.

Once you’re working, it becomes very easy to rely on what you already know, and that’s when your thinking starts getting repetitive. You have to keep challenging your own sense of what’s good, what’s relevant, and what people actually want.

Were there any fashion events, talks, or experiences at Vogue College of Fashion that opened new doors for you?

There were so many.

Within my first month at Vogue College, Victoria Beckham came in to speak to us, which was a surreal introduction to studying fashion in London. I was suddenly sitting in a room listening to her talk about building her business. It was one of those moments where you think, this is what going to fashion university in one of the biggest cities in the world can look like.

Charlotte Collins, Editor-in-Chief of SheerLuxe, is another talk I still think about. She spoke about the years before SheerLuxe became what people know it as today: the much longer, less glamorous period of building, learning an audience, and making decisions that only look obvious in hindsight.

The New York trip was another huge experience. We visited the Richard Avedon exhibition while we were there, and his work is still something I reference constantly. I’m completely obsessed with the restraint and the strength of his imagery. Seeing that body of work in person reinforced how powerful an image can be when you know exactly what to leave out.

Having the opportunity to meet Anna Wintour was also pretty hard to beat.

Can you share an example of how you applied what you learned at Vogue College of Fashion in your professional career as a brand and creative strategist?

Trend forecasting shows up in my work more than anything else.

Every audience insight, positioning decision, or conversation I have with a founder about where their category is going comes back to the same principle: read the behavior before reacting to the trend.

The other very practical habit I still use is a research log I started during the program. It’s a spreadsheet of papers, essays, articles, videos, people, references, and contacts, each with either the key finding or the reason I wanted to keep it.

It’s grown over the years, and I use it constantly: as evidence in client work, as a reference point, and as a way of noticing when something I read two years ago has quietly started becoming relevant.

The principle underneath it is probably the thing I’d pass on most. Research is only useful if you can find it again. Knowledge can’t live in screenshots on your phone or in folders you’ll never reopen. You need a system that lets you come back to what you’ve learned and connect it to something new.

What advice would you give to current Vogue College of Fashion students?

Stay curious past the point where it’s being assessed. Build your portfolio from your first month. Talk to as many people as you can, and value the conversations that don’t explicitly lead anywhere.

Use the time to build both confidence and skills. It’s an exploratory period by design, so fail while failing is cheap. That’s what confidence is made of.

Take what you’re learning out into the industry while you’re still studying. Work, intern, go to talks, meet people, ask questions, and put yourself in rooms where you don’t feel completely qualified to be in yet. Academic learning and practical experience together are worth far more than either one on its own.

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to know exactly what your career is going to look like when you graduate.

I didn’t apply to Vogue College of Fashion knowing I wanted to become a brand strategist. The point was to see enough of the industry to work out where my strengths and interests actually lay.

Keep researching, keep looking, and keep building things. You don’t have to know exactly where it’s going yet.