Summary: Nesha Sanghavi, owner of University Girls, is a former West Virginia University Varsity cheerleader for the men’s football and basketball teams and a WVU alumni. During her time as a cheerleader, Nesha noticed a lack of fashion in the collegiate apparel market and decided to take matters into her own hands, creating University Girls Apparel. After graduating from WVU with a degree in Finance and Economics, Nesha was accepted to the top fashion school, Parsons the New School for Design in New York City. During her studies, she was invited to finish her degree while working for PUMA at their global headquarters in Germany. Nesha has done a great amount of market research to develop and produce unique women’s tops that are not currently offered in the collegiate market. While University Girls offers styles for women of all ages, their main targeting customer is an alumni woman, aged 25+. There are 2 issues in women’s collegiate merchandise that University Girls Apparel aims to fix, sizing and styling. What University Girls does differently: Sizing – Currently, the majority of women’s collegiate merchandise is only offered in junior sizing. Nesha conducted several focus groups where she found that average sized women had to buy the largest size offered, or could not fit in any sizes at all. These women were also of an alumni age with discretionary income to spend. She decided to custom make all of her size charts, allowing for average sized women to feel comfortable and confident in University Girls Apparel. In her second collection, and after another round of focus groups, Nesha added Plus Sizing into her collection. Plus sizing has been recognized as an underdeveloped market and not many companies are offering this size set. Styling – The women’s collegiate market has become saturated with basic t-shirts and fleece with screen prints, or loud and busy graphic prints. Nesha has designed tops and fleece that are in line with what is hot and on trend in the regular sportswear market. Her goal is to take styles that women love to wear in their everyday lives, and translate them to the collegiate market by focusing on the silhouette of the style, rather than the graphics. This results in styles that women can feel fashionable in, and are age appropriate, can be worn to work and out for the night. UG Apparel is currently licensed for 20 top universities across the US including Alabama, Georgia, Auburn, Tennessee and Nebraska.”
