Zoë’s Story – Changing Life Trajectory

Zoë, alumna from NFTE Class of 2009, discovered Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship while in high school in 2008. Her business plan was formulated around her interests and talent as she launched Zoë Damacela Apparel. She qualified for NFTE’s national competition, where she finished second overall. This gave Zoë a great deal of exposure for herself and for her business. She was subsequently featured on both local and national news channels. She was also invited to the White House by President Obama, after which publicity began surrounding her and her business spiked to even greater levels. She was featured on the cover of Seventeen Magazine. As a result, sales of her apparel and accessories boomed.

After high school, Zoë attended Northwestern University where she continued to run her business throughout her college years. Upon graduating and keen to embark upon a new challenge, Zoë wanted to see what it would be like to apply her entrepreneurial grounding to be an intrapreneur within a larger organization. She undertook several internship positions, including one at Macy’s. It was there that she found a perfect place for her combination of creativity and intrapreneur capabilities to flourish. She rose quickly through the ranks, from designer to Senior Design Manager and now Design Director. Her expertise spans fashion design, illustration, trend forecasting, and product development. She now manages an impressive $1.5 billion in annual volume across two private brands and leads the design for the top-rated plus-size brand in the market.

Zoë credits NFTE with building her strong foundation and her life skills, teaching her “how to take a really big idea and break it into manageable and practicable pieces.” She believes that NFTE helped her identify opportunities and, most of all, to speak confidently in public, in a way that resonates with her target audience: “I used to be terrified of public speaking. I wouldn’t even raise my hand. Then after several business competition rounds, it became a breeze.”

Today, as she looks back at her journey to her dream job, she attributes much of her success to that ability to speak publicly within a large corporation: “Being able to explain the creative idea in a way that those more comfortable with finance can relate to has been extremely valuable to me and to my success within a larger organization.”