Sustainable Business: Ralph Lauren's Design with Intent
The Evening
The Gromek Institute for Fashion Business welcomed James Jeter, Creative Director of Design & Brand Direction for Men's Polo, and Dara Douglas, Product and Brand Lead of Design with Intent at Ralph Lauren, for an evening that bridged fashion, purpose, and storytelling.
The program opened with a screening of A Portrait of the American Dream: Oak Bluffs, a short film celebrating heritage, community, and place. What followed was a candid fireside chat on Sustainable Business: Design with Intent, where Jeter and Douglas reflected on authenticity and representation, navigating legacy institutions, and translating Ralph Lauren's vision and values for a new generation.
As they noted, Ralph Lauren's purpose remains clear: to inspire the dream of a better life through authenticity and timeless style.
Why Design with Intent
The work started in 2020 when Ralph Lauren, like many institutions, asked itself: What stories are we telling? Who are we leaving out? This led to the creation of Design with Intent, a department dedicated to expanding the brand's narrative beyond its historical focus on White Ivy League aesthetics.
As James articulated: "It's really to kind of open the aperture to the stories that we tell and just understand Ralph Lauren's role and responsibility being a global brand, and the messages that we put out into a global audience."
Relationship First, Design Second
Both Dara & James emphasized that authentic work begins with genuine relationships. The Morehouse and Spelman collection emerged from one-on-one conversations with Ralph Lauren, showing him yearbook images that expanded assumptions about collegiate style. The Oak Bluffs project involved connecting with Mrs. Joyce Graves, whose father was a photographer for a Philadelphia newspaper who captured candid imagery of the Oak Bluffs community. The team sat at her dining room table, combing through family photographs—not extracting images, but building trust. "If the trust is not there, you're not going to get this amazing output," Dara said. "They had to trust us, and our institution had to trust us. Ralph Lauren had to trust us." This wasn't transactional. Community members weren't vendors—they were partners making decisions about what could be shared publicly and what remained sacred.
The Internal Dance
Getting buy-in within a large, established brand required navigating competing departmental priorities and anxiety around unfamiliar ideas. James described the "dance" of pitching ideas that expand brand identity while respecting its DNA: "Finding a space where you can find freedom within a framework."
When asked what to do if buy-in doesn't come, he emphasized that micro-learning moments matter as much as final output. "There's a lot of micro learning moments that happen that no one ever sees... these teachable moments that go both ways with not only how we want to show up individually, but how we sort of want to show up collectively as a brand."
Depth vs Virality
The team opted for a 22-minute film over the industry-standard 15 to 60-second clips. James explained: "There's so much nuance and so much context that it would be barely possible to fit it all into a 22-minute film, but it would be impossible to fit that into 30 seconds." his framework reflected the entire philosophy, depth over virality, specificity over scale, community voice, and emphasizing brand messaging.
The Result
The collection sold out almost immediately. But the speakers made clear that wasn't the measure of success. Success was in the relationships built, the trust established, and the institutional learning that happened. Success lay in presenting a nuanced, multidimensional portrait of the Black experience—not as a monolith, but as a rich legacy of entrepreneurship, family, aspiration, and joy.
Advice for Students
"Your voice has weight, and your voice matters," James told students. "A lot of folks are waiting for new energy in these spaces, in these rooms."
Dara emphasized the importance of listening to your heart when your path changes direction, and the power of telling everyone what you're looking for. "Don't deprive us of your gift by being discouraged. Continue to move forward."
