Profile
Joshua Williams is an award winning fashion creative director, consultant and educator. Over the past twenty years, Joshua has always excelled at the intersection of creativity and commerce, combining his talents as a writer, theater director and musician, with a penchant for marketing, retail and business.
Early on in his career, Joshua was known for facilitating unlikely collaborations, that increased excitement and engagement between customer and brand, including a live performance by Emilie Simon at a Mandy Coon fashion show, or hiring Johnny Reznik (Goo Goo Dolls) to emcee a runway show to market the launch of a new musical and support VH1 Save the Music.
In the early 2000s, Joshua was on the frontline of fashion retail’s shift to online. He was hired by American brand, J.McLaughlin to develop an e-commerce strategy, that quickly turn into a complete rebrand of the company to better facilitate an online presence, and a connect their quirky brick and mortar stores with a digital experience. It was there that he developed his creative director skills, directing and styling photo shoots and developing all content for the brand.
In 2007, Joshua became Vice President of Marketing at E-Commerce at Lindsay Phillips, a footwear start-up. Over the course of three years, he was instrumental in building sales from $750,000 to $25 million across wholesale, retail and direct-to-consumer channels on a global scale.
In 2011, Joshua saw a need to support other fashion brands in their transitions to a more omni-channel retail and marketing structure, and launched Fashion Consort. Since then, he has worked with such brands as JM, Anne Valerie Hash, Andrew Marc and Miguelina. He works with brands to negotiate the complex needs of a brand’s sales distribution strategy across multiple platforms, cognizant of emerging technologies and the ever-changing needs of a modern consumer.
At the same time, he was asked to develop and teach a course in fashion e-commerce at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In time, he began to write and teach additional courses for the MFA Fashion Design and MPS Global Fashion Management programs, in line with needs of a fast-changing fashion industry. Joshua served for eight years as the host of “Faces & Places in Fashion” an FIT lecture series that featured fashion experts and icons including Ozwald Boating, Fern Mallis, Joe Zee and Simon Doonan.
Joshua continued to balance his consulting work with more formal academic roles, including a four-year stint as the Chair of the Fashion Merchandising Program at Berkeley College. While there he developed key skills in course development, production, mapping and accreditation. In 2019, Joshua accepted a full time position as Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design, where he served first as Associate Director and then Director of the MPS Fashion Management program. In 2019, he was responsible for developing a ground-breaking online version of the FM program that features fully produced learning modules, including video lectures, filmed “on set” and “on the streets” of New York City. He is now engaged in rethinking what a more hybrid approach to education looks like post-pandemic, with a focus on content development and distribution.
Joshua’s passion continues to be developing new, collaborative content. In spring 2020, he launched the “Retail Revolution” podcast with Christopher Lacy, which now reaches listeners in 50+ countries. He is also the writer and producer of “Fashion Consort News Bytes,” a short-format podcast distributed in partnership with FashionUnited. Since then, he has acquired three new podcasts that now make up the FC Podcasts network. And he is currently expanding his agency to produce custom educational and training content, in the areas of design, culture, retail, marketing and brand building.
Joshua is a guest lecturer at many universities worldwide, and is often seen on television, sharing his fashion expertise.
Degrees Held
MPS, Global Fashion Management, Fashion Institute of Technology
BA, Theater Arts, Brigham Young University
Professional Affiliation
Fashion Service Network
Recent Publications
Retail Revolution podcast (Producer)
Fashion Consort News Bytes podcast (Writer / Producer)
News Bytes articles (Writer / In Partnership wtih FashionUnited)
Performances and Appearances
Q&A with Joshua Williams (article, FashionUnited)
New York Fashion Week in the Covid-19 Era (TV, CGTN)
Podcast Launched (article, WWD)
The Case for Gender Fluid Fashion (podcast, The Fashion Consumer)
Three Lessons Other Industries Can Learn from Fashion Retail (article, The Economist)
Will Coronavirus Change Fashion? (article, Bustle)
Research Interests
Omni-Channel Retail, Niche Marketing, Interactive Engagement
Fashion Semiotics and Expression through lens of Gender, Sexuality and Society
Educational Training, Hybrid Learning, Content Development
Portfolio
LinkedIn
Personal Website
Fashion Consort, Agency
Retail Revolution
NewsBytes