Masala Maternity is our senior apparel marketing capstone project. Over the semester we worked as partners on a "real-world" apparel merchandising, marketing, and management project. We developed a complete business plan for a "socially responsible" retailer, Masala Maternity. Our business plan incorporates a triple bottom line and sustainable practices. Our business is located in Manhattan, Kansas at 320 Southwind Road.
Traditionally masala is a mix of many spices used in South Asian cuisine. The name comes from the Hindi word for spice. When developing our name I reflected on my childhood eating many Indian dishes with heaping spoonfuls of my parent's handmade masala. As my partner Fabiana and I began researching the maternity industry and the concept of mother hood we realized that just like masala is a mixture of many spices, motherhood is a mixture of many unique experiences for all kinds of women. We decided the name Masala Maternity with the vision (since there are no official maternity stores in Manhattan, Kansas) to ensure that every mother in Manhattan enters their pregnancy with the apparel they need to succeed in motherhood and life.
We were very fortunate to work with the seniors in graphic design at K-State, specificlly the wonderful and talented Autumn Short. Autumn was in charge of creating advertising, bag, boxes, tags, deliverables, letterhead, logo, photography, signage, social media presence, standards manual, and a website mock-up (below).
We were in charge of creating a visual display window for Masala Maternity. Our window inspiration came from my time as a visual display intern at Anthropologie. I wanted to take subtle nods with the plants and tapestry in the back. Overall our window inspiration theme was to "bring life to our windows" since our store is all about bringing life into the world.
Example of our cash wrap.
Store layout by categories
Store layout including placement of departments and fixtures. To scale at our official location, 320 Southwind Road.
Above an example of Masala Maternity’s email newsletter.
Above shows an example of Masala Maternity’s blog newsletter, the Masala Edit.
The final component of this assignment was to create and present a poster. The purpose of the poster was to visually communicate the most essential components of our business.
