Alumni
Grad is Founder of Sustainable Brand Goddess Rising Intimates
Kelli Burt grew up making giant wall collages from copies of Teen Vogue and Tiger Beat magazines. Obsessed with online fashion blogs and secondhand shopping, Kelli was thrilled to learn that studying fashion was a career option after a FIDM Representative visited her classroom. “I applied to FIDM my junior year of high school and got accepted before I even took my SATs,” Kelli said. “You could say I was a fashion nerd.” After graduating from FIDM with a degree in Merchandise Product Development, Kelli worked as a freelance designer for three years and was previously the designer and production manager for a menswear startup company. In 2020, she founded Goddess Rising Intimates, a sustainable brand featuring organic cotton sourced in the U.S., 100 percent plant dyes, and recycled metal.
What led you to start Goddess Rising Intimates in 2020? I previously worked as the designer and production manager for a menswear startup company BYLT Basics. It was honestly a dream job — I was 'the' design department. Because the company was smaller, I sat in on a lot of marketing, customer service and sales meetings with the owner. It was an extremely well-rounded experience to give me the confidence to understand how to make a company and what it takes. Right before the pandemic, I fell in love and chose to follow love to Philly, which led me to be unemployed from my really amazing job. With more time on my side (and a happy heart), I decided to follow my passion for lingerie and intimates and start my brand, Goddess Rising Intimates. I always thought about starting a company, but the end result is the knowing. I had to know.
Why is sustainability important to you? It still shakes me a little to see how sustainability is not important to every and anyone. I believe that we create so much waste in our daily lives and our sweet little Earth can only take so much. I can't sit here and think other people care as much as I do. I have to take action to take care of our home. Sustainability is important because our buying actions support our future. A lot of people are not educated in how wasteful their clothes are (hi, fast fashion), where they come from, how they are made, and the effect their creation has on our ecosystems. Fashion is the world's third largest pollutant. This has to change.
How did FIDM help prepare you for entrepreneurship? I definitely think that FIDM has prepared me as much as it has because I decided to utilize every tool it gave me when I was a student. Being a student is like being a mini-entrepreneur. I got to choose what resources to use, how to connect and network, how far to challenge myself, how to expand into my capacity to create, and how to balance that creativity with responsibility. FIDM helped prepare me with the insight of the professors still in the industry, the willingness of the staff to help me in any way possible, and gave me confidence to be an employed designer at the age of 19. FIDM is an amazing tool, it all depends on how much you decide to utilize it.
Learn more online at goddessrising.co or on Instagram @goddessrising_intimates
Categories: Merchandise Product Development Alumni
