Alumni/ae Connected: Bardian Self-Starters Several years after graduation, five individual entrepreneurs found themselves working together and supporting one another in ways that they had never expected before they launched their own businesses. Here is an example of how a group of Bardians became greater than the sum of its parts. In 2015, Mark Ransom Day ’07, who had majored in art history, began his own venture amid a career working for public relations, marketing, and advertising agencies in New York City. Recognizing the waning effectiveness of traditional advertising and PR, Day launched Forge on Hudson, an integrated communications firm that works with clients to create influence by creating content—through words, moving image, or experience of a product, service, or an idea. “I started to think about the relationship between my major at Bard and current work. Art history is the study of perception over time, and marketing is the management of perception over time,” he says. “People no longer fit into a mold defined by focus groups and marketers. They find each other and form groups, identities based on commonalities. Individuals, as opposed to brands, have power.” Forge on Hudson offers its clients a menu of services: triage (management of immediate needs), strategy (thoughtful planning), artifacts (creation of content), and distribution (outreach through media channels). In designing a logo for his startup, Day called on classmate Anja Savic ’07, who had also started her own business: The Letterist, a boutique design, lettering, and illustration studio in Lusaka, Zambia. After graduation, Savic, a literature major who had immersed herself in Don Quixote and 15th-century European literature, moved to Belgrade to pursue her own writing, then took a master’s degree in humanities and cultural studies from the London Consortium. Blogging and copywriting led to advertising. “I was fascinated by consumer behavior, thinking up material that was not only written but visual, interactive,” says Savic, who eventually ran the Zambian office of the renowned advertising agency Saatchi&Saatchi. “It was nice to enjoy allexpenses-paid travel, to see work I had created on huge billboards,” says Savic. “Over time, however, that lost its allure. I had traded in my world of Proust for one of Powerpoint and purchase orders.” So she quit, and took courses in graphic design at Parsons School of Design in New York City. Realizing that people were willing to pay for her handwritten designs, she returned to Zambia and within a month had set up her own business. The Letterist creates fine stationery as well as custom work for clients worldwide—a logo for a bakery, a brush-lettered Latin quote, a wedding invitation in three languages. “I am more fulfilled than I’ve ever been,” she says. “I’m back to what I became at Bard; as my Bard friends joke, I’m a ‘man of letters.’” Fascinated by book design, Savic still owns every book she read at Bard, including at least a dozen editions of Don Quixote. Savic found herself connecting with other Bardian entrepreneurs: Christine Gasparich ’08 in Boston and Julia Carrozzini ’08 in Istanbul, who was collaborating with Jeffrey Ozawa ’09 in Los Angeles—all of whom had also transformed their creative passions into businesses. “Whether sharing start-up experiences or sending business to one another and opening up networks, these relationships have prove to be incredibly meaningful,” says Savic. 24 on and off campus
Mark Ransom Day ’07 photo Geoffrey Paracka
Anja Savic ’07
Christine Gasparich ’08 photo Caty Smith
Julie Carrozzini ’08
Jeffrey Ozawa ’09 photo Jaimie Lewis
Gasparich, a sociology major, bought and redecorated a house in Washington, D.C., with her husband, John Hambley ’06, in 2012. They hosted a Bard alumni/ae event at which a guest inquired who their decorator was and, finding out Gasparich had done the work herself, asked if she would work with her house. “It had never occurred to me that someone might be willing to pay me for decorating,” says Gasparich. “I realized that I could have a career that also serves as a creative outlet.” Several months later, she left her nonprofit job to pursue interior design. After spending a year assisting a seasoned designer, Gasparich launched Christine Alice Interiors, her own one-person bespoke interior-design firm. “One of my greatest joys is hearing from clients that they’re enjoying their newly transformed spaces,” says Gasparich. Art history major Carrozzini worked in the New York art and fashion PR worlds after graduation. Ready for a new challenge, she looked toward Turkey, her mother’s birthplace. She and business partner Zeynep Yildirim launched Juice Kitchen, the first cold-press juice brand in Turkey. Based in Istanbul, the company delivers juice all around the city of 14 million. “Despite the current political uprisings, the Turkish government encourages entrepreneurship,” says Carrozzini. “The government offers tax relief for companies that employ women, and at Juice Kitchen we are in fact a ‘girl gang,’ with four employees: all women, all ages.” Juice Kitchen hopes to expand, with an eye to Kuwait, Qatar, the U.A.E., and Nigeria. Carrozzini hopes to make fresh juices accessible to a wider population, but entrepreneurship comes with challenges, especially fear of failure. “Fear puts you exactly where you should be,” she says. “If things don’t go the way you expected, you have to be ready to fine-tune and reinvent.” Spanish major Ozawa was visiting family in Japan when his entrepreneurial idea dawned. He bought a boxed lunch and was struck by the beauty of this simple convenience. “I had a vision of the most beautiful bento. I moved to Los Angeles to chase that idea,” he says. His company, Gorumando, is a boutique catering service featuring Japanese boxed lunches made with excellent ingredients. “The working lunch is an American tradition, but I think the standards have plummeted recently, or maybe they were never all that good,” he says. “A lot of my friends complain how bad their lunch options are where they work.” Ozawa describes a typical day: buying fish from New Zealanders by LAX, negotiating with Japanese businessmen downtown, fielding emails about dietary restrictions, calling on friends at their farm in Ventura. “It’s a constant ballet and incredibly exhausting, but the work has a sense of humor,” he says. Day and Savic envision a vibrant network of alumni/ae who, like themselves and Ozawa, Gasparich, and Carrozzini, have built or are thinking about building their own businesses. “We started looking at this global network of people who are working together—cooperating as if we were still on campus,” says Day. Savic adds, “We spent the most formative years of our lives sharing ideas on the most complex texts and theories. Why wouldn’t we continue to do this in a way that benefits all of our businesses and ventures?” Alumni/ae interested in connecting professionally should contact the Career Connections Committee of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors at alumni@bard.edu.