In Conversation with Michelle Rose

Tell us about your background: 
Hello! I am a performance apparel designer, artist, martial artist, musician and mother of an almost-eleven-year-old boy. I spent about 15 years creating stylish technical outerwear for the two largest outdoor brands (Columbia Sportswear and The North Face) as well as sportswear and other apparel products for smaller brands and startups. I've started my own businesses, including my current Struktur Society, a community for creators in art, design, and music, which started with a design conference called Struktur Event in 2014 and Struktur Podcast in 2016. I also run a design consulting arm called Struktur Koncept. Along with my career in design and being a mom, I am a fifth degree black belt in Indonesian King Fu with thirty years experience behind me and a newer student of music, focussing on guitar, voice, and music theory since 2017.

What do you wish you’d known when you started out?

Save your stock if your company goes public and awards you options! I was with Starbucks in 1992 when they went public and we all received shares. However, I was way too young to know how valuable it would be and had no guidance on what to do with it.

On a leadership note, as you move into team management and hiring, be picky and demanding on choosing the team that works for you. I was naturally very good at training and mentoring people from an early age so I often found myself "inheriting" challenging people in my manager's effort to turn them around and get a better performance from them. I had to learn not to "save" people and to demand the best team I could for the ultimate job I was hired to do. Which meant, I needed to choose my people and my team myself.

Best career advice you've ever received?

"Education debt is good debt". Now, this is a very loaded statement these days, however it was a key statement to my deciding in my late-twenties to put myself through a degree program in design, incurring all the debt myself. I hadn't finished any college program earlier in my life and wasn't headed on any type of career track that would support me or give me creative growth. I was stuck and broke and not sure how I was ever going to pay for it. I was VERY nervous about taking on any debt but my roommate encouraged me and said those words above. I took on the debt, proceeded to get not one but two degrees and kicked off my whole professional design career. I was also very fortunate to then be able to fully pay off that debt. This doesn't happen for everyone, but for me, the debt for the degrees made all the difference in my even having a "career path".

What leadership qualities are important to you?

Vision. Collaboration. Compassion. To me, a leader must have a vision, see something larger, something that doesn't exist, and figure out a way to make it happen. A leader must work well with others, pull together people who can work together to help make the vision a reality. A leader doesn't need to know everything, just how to build the right team and how to share the vision with everyone. Lastly, compassion is essential to understand yourself and all the different souls on your team, what you all need, how you're all different, and how you will all evolve through the project and through life. I have to say that I have had the great fortune of having worked for some great leaders, the first being Howard Schultz at Starbucks in the early nineties. He set the stage for me and embodied all three of these qualities in spades.

What has been the biggest challenge in your career so far? 

Truly stepping into the leadership shoes in understanding my worth, standing up for myself, and demanding the best for myself....so that I may create the best for my team and the company. It is taking me some time to fully realize that demanding the best for ourselves as leaders is not selfish but rather provides us with the support, resources, and recognition that we need to make bold, difficult, and necessary choices.

And for fun, what is your favorite wardrobe staple?

A black fitted merino wool turtleneck sweater. Being a performance/outerwear designer, a martial artist, mother, an artist and musician who travels a lot I find a black turtleneck to be indispensable to my mod personality and need to look active, edgy, and chic. It has to perform and take a beating and still look great in all my various environments and situations...and I can pair it with anything!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemrose/

Website: https://www.struktursociety.com

Instagram: @strukturkoncept