What You Study Doesn't Matter as Much as Where You Learn to See the World

I have five or six diplomas. I stopped counting.

Design school in Paris. Business courses. Certifications in things I no longer use. Each one felt important when I was pursuing it. Looking back, the accumulation of credentials is almost comical compared to what actually shaped my career.

Here is what I actually believe, after all of it:

Your Major Matters Less Than Where You Study

Not the prestige of the school. The location.

A good city gives you something no curriculum can: real proximity to the thing you want to do. Paris put me within walking distance of every major luxury house in the world. I walked past Chanel, Dior, Hermès every single day. I learned to read visual identity by absorbing it constantly, not by studying it in a classroom. That education showed up in unexpected places — including how I think about brand naming now.

The city gave me internships I couldn't have gotten elsewhere. It gave me classmates from twenty countries who thought about design differently than I did. It gave me the fish market where I found the iridescent textures that became the Fish Market jewelry series. You can't plan that kind of learning. You can only put yourself somewhere it's possible.

Most Teachers Don't Have Commercial Experience

This sounds harsh. I mean it descriptively, not critically.

Teachers, especially in non-business schools, teach learning. That's the job. Most of them haven't run a business, navigated a client relationship, priced their work against a market, or dealt with the particular problem of making something beautiful that also needs to sell.

Some of my friends graduated from top universities with excellent academic records. Their income is lower than mine because I started building commercial experience earlier. Not because I'm smarter — because I was in a city that made it possible to start, and I started.

I once faked an internship. I understood almost immediately how useless the deception was. Pretending cheats only yourself — you return with nothing, and the gap between you and someone who actually did the work widens. After that, I took every real opportunity I could find, regardless of how unglamorous it looked on paper.

Made by Someone Who Learned by Doing

Effort Has a Specific Window

My art teacher told me something before the college entrance exam that I've never forgotten: "Your work has to stand out among thousands to get a high score."

I learned drawing from zero and within two months ranked in the top hundred. Not because I was talented — because I understood, for the first time, that effort applied with specific intention in a specific window produces specific results. That lesson transferred directly to business.

The problem with how most people think about effort is that they apply it diffusely — working hard in general, improving across the board, trying to be better at everything. That's less effective than finding the one constraint that limits everything else and removing it.

In jewelry design: the constraint was my own reluctance to study what already worked before trying to invent something new. Removing that constraint opened everything else.

What I'd Actually Tell Someone Starting Out

Go somewhere real things are happening and make yourself useful to them. Take work that seems below you if it puts you in the room. Pay attention to the whole process — not just your part of it. Understanding production, logistics, customer behavior, pricing: these aren't "business" skills separate from design. They're design skills with a different output.

The designers I know who are doing the most interesting work understand the entire chain from idea to person holding the object. That understanding is what allows you to make decisions that are genuinely good rather than just aesthetically pleasing.

Everything has a method. Once you start, the problem begins to solve itself. The hardest part is almost always the starting.

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Ren — founder of Fairies Whisper. Five or six diplomas. Learned most of it elsewhere.