Fashion Alumna Uses Years of Industry Experience to Found Niche Firm

After years working in industry where she led start-ups of corporate product-development departments, introduced new technologies into corporate design departments and much more, UC alumna Beth Herrin recently began her own firm.

After years' worth of leadership roles in industry positions around the country, University of Cincinnati fashion design alumna Beth Herrin, 50, a resident of Lockland, recently stepped into her most challenging leadership assignment of all - heading her own firm.

She founded RealityPlus Clothing Company LLC, an internet-based apparel retailer that already has clients from 49 out of the 50 U.S. states, and is poised to begin international sales.

Beth Herrin
Beth Herrin at work.
Said Herrin, "I'd long known I wanted to start my own business. After 20 years of taking on tough, sometimes unpopular challenges in industry, I felt ready to use all I'd learned in school and in industry to start my own business."


Those challenges began immediately after she graduated in 1981 from UC's internationally ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). She moved to Los Angeles to design childrenswear, then to San Francisco and then to Miami, Fla., working for small, private firms. Later, she returned to Ohio to work for large corporations, including VF Corporation, Mercantile Corp., and R.G. Berry Corp.

Along the way, she learned Spanish in order to direct garment workers, began corporate product-development departments from scratch, and retrained entire corporate design staffs in the use of technology.

Herrin admitted, "I've been the eternal co-op student, going from one place and challenge and on to the next." (Co-op, invented by UC in 1906, is the practice wherein students alternate quarters in school with quarters of paid, professional work related directly to their major.)

While she was a UC student, Herrin's own co-ops took her to Florida and California where she worked for the Walt Disney Corporation and to Atlanta and Washington, D.C., where she co-opped with Rich's (now Macy's Inc.) and with Garfinkle's (a one-time department store).

It was those same co-op experiences that helped set the direction of her life and, importantly, helped her family to understand the many career possibilities that would be open to her in the field of design.

She explained, "No one in my family had ever pursued a design career before I came to DAAP. My going into design scared my dad. My mom was encouraging, but she didn't understand the profession."

That changed after Herrin returned from her first Disney co-op. She recalled, "On my second day back in Cincinnati, I woke up, and my portfolio of work was gone. You have to understand that my dad worked in a paper factory. I was terrified he'd taken my portfolio in order to recycle the paper in it."

Instead, her father had borrowed the portfolio in order to look through it and to understand his daughter's profession. "After that," said Herrin, "He got it. And for the first time that year, he came to the end-of-the-year fashion show."

Beth Herrin
Beth Herrin sketching out concepts.
She added, "Co-op was so important in not only helping to me gain professional experience and a foothold in industry. And without it, I don't think my family would have ever understood all the real possibilities that are open to designers."


The atmosphere within DAAP also contributed to Herrin's early success. She remembered, "The best part about DAAP was the small, intimate atmosphere. The people I went to school with were passionate about design. They wanted to be there. The teachers wanted to be there too."

As an example, she recalled how one-time head of the fashion design program, Betty Heck, "would come back to school after dinner. She'd stay with us in the studios till midnight. And then, we were all back at it again the next day. We loved it so much, the work was like play."

It's that attitude and that commitment, combined with co-op, that differentiates UC and DAAP, she said.

"I've hired design graduates for companies big and small for over 20 years. I've been able to compare DAAP graduates with those from other universities. I'm speaking objectively when I say there is no comparison. Because of co-op, DAAP grads have the level of maturity and skill that the world expects. Other programs just don't," Herrin stated.

And the balance in the UC studio courses also makes a difference. According to Herrin, students are provided a mix of design theory, technical skills and, importantly, permission to exercise individual creativity. That's not always the case elsewhere.

She recalled, "I once interviewed students from a New York City school. Every one of their portfolios copied a style of illustration that exactly replicated that of their teacher. There was absolutely no difference between student A and student B. They were just copies of a mold." Something that no company wants, she said.

And something that Herrin certainly doesn't want for her own growing firm. Currently, her sales are all internet based; however, she is now interviewing sales representatives to assist her in certain key cities. And as the business grows, the first place she plans to come for assistance is UC.

"The minute I am able to, I'll be hiring UC co-ops. I know the quality of the DAAP education and the passion of the students there. Plus, I'll need help in running the business, and they'll gain experience in every facet of a niche enterprise, from international manufacturing, to distribution, pricing, order fulfillment, client services, marketing and design," she said, explaining that such experience would be especially valuable for any student who hopes, one day, to begin his or her own business.

She added, "I'll be the business elective every entrepreneurial design student dreams of."