Cambridge MBAs on building beauty, fashion and health brands

We hear from 3 Cambridge MBA graduates who share how their experiences at Cambridge have shaped their career path in the world of sustainable fashion and beauty. 

From finance to a sustainable fashion startup

When Forté Fellow Julia Aslet (nee Goldfeld), MBA 2019 arrived from the US to start her MBA in Cambridge, she had a plan. After 5 years spent on the trading floor at HSBC, Credit Suisse and J.P. Morgan, she was determined to become an entrepreneur. Plus, she had the germ of a business idea for a range of sustainable workwear for professional women. 

“I had been concerned for a long time about chemicals in the environment, including those in clothing as well as in the food chain. Synthetic materials – for example, even recycled polyester – can cause allergies and, according to emerging research, may contribute to potential negative health effects.” 

Fast forward to 2025, and her company, Goelet London, is up and running – though not in the workwear space. Goelet London offers luxury dresses that combine old fashioned romance with sustainable design.

Julia’s path since her MBA has not been easy. COVID-19 hit in the latter part of her MBA year, limiting her immediate job prospects at the time.  

“After my MBA I went back to my old job in forex sales in New York, this time working for BBVA. I immediately noticed a more casual look on the trading floor. Employees had swapped button downs and suits for trainers and jeans. The workwear landscape I once knew had completely changed.” 

With her original concept challenged by the move to work from home, Julia credits her MBA with helping her to think about her business prospects differently.  

“I chose the Entrepreneurship Concentration for my MBA, and the teaching and experience consistently challenged my way of thinking – in a good way! I continued to seek opportunities to break into the sustainable fashion industry and eventually pivoted from workwear to the women’s luxury sector.”  

In middle school in the US, Julia was an avid reader of Jane Austen and dreamed of living in England, so Cambridge was an obvious choice. It was in Cambridge that she met her husband. An invitation to be photographed for the frontispiece of Country Life magazine for her engagement led her to design a dress for herself. 

Inspired by that dreamy gown, Julia’s company, Goelet London, offers the ‘Girls in Pearls’ dress range to a market interested in sustainable luxury. Although her original designs were made in London, as Julia looks ahead to her new collection, her goal is to make the pieces more affordable to a wider range of clients. This means seeking high quality, sustainable suppliers in new locations across Europe. 

“I am focusing on production with the lessons learned from my MBA. It is difficult to attract investors in the fashion industry, so my plan is to grow slowly.”  

A wellness brand in an emerging market

Noor Mandviwalla, MBA 2023 comes from a family of lawyers, and at 18, she too found herself reading law at SOAS in London. However, upon graduating, she joined a very different side of the family business, where she had the opportunity to develop the expansion strategy for a rapidly growing chain of salons in Pakistan. 

Noor’s mother, Saeeda, is a graduate of the London College of Fashion and trained as both a beauty therapist and a hairdresser. 

“My mother owned the first Toni&Guy franchise in Pakistan, which she initially ran as a one-woman show, with her first salon in our kitchen. As the business grew, we both thought I could help.” 

Together they opened 3 new stores. There are now 8 in total across Pakistan.  

“Toni&Guy is not just an international hairdressing brand, it is also about fashion and art. The brand is the biggest pioneer in the industry, being the first, for example, to introduce digital learning platforms during the pandemic.” 

The product range is imported into Pakistan, which creates administrative challenges. Noor also found herself involved in the financial interests of the employees. 

“Beauty salons provide a safe space for women to work in Pakistan. We offer employment to minorities, who are often excluded from the workplace. Many of them did not even have bank accounts, so we teamed up with local banks to offer them financial training. Working as a business owner in emerging markets you have no choice but to deal with the social issues.” 

Alongside her strategic work as Executive Director of Toni&Guy, South Pakistan, Noor became the founder and director of Spa Ceylon Pakistan in 2020, successfully introducing the world’s largest Ayurveda wellness brand. 

Her experience covered everything from licensing and brand positioning to streamlining operations with digital systems. However, in the family business, there was little structure, and Noor wanted to learn how corporations operated. 

“My mother’s key business skill is building long lasting relationships. I wanted to become more confident in my own business skills in the larger corporate world, and I felt that academically, an MBA was the logical next step.” 

Noor applied to Cambridge because of the work experience and projects on offer, as well as the out-of-class placements. 

“I wasn’t prepared for how extreme the first few weeks of the MBA felt, as it challenged me both academically and socially. It was amazing!” 

In terms of her career path, Noor often found herself at the opposite end of the spectrum from many of her peers. She highlighted that while many of her peers had backgrounds in large corporations or consulting firms or were considering startups, she had experience in growing a beauty business in an emerging market and wanted to gain insight into the corporate world. 

As a musician who also plays professionally, she was delighted that one of her consulting projects was with a record label, Snafu Records, in Sweden, working alongside Cambridge MBA graduate, Mira Howard, MBA 2020. 

She expressed that working on the MBA Global Consulting Project involved collaborating with a real client and a team of 5 people from different countries and professional backgrounds. Although it required quick learning, it presented numerous opportunities. 

Noor made many connections while dining and meeting people through her Cambridge College, as well as through her MBA class, and she is now networking while exploring her next career steps. She explains how, “everyone is doing something phenomenal. It certainly makes you humble. You meet ridiculously smart people working very hard. I have faith that the wider University of Cambridge network will open doors”. 

Cosmetics, consumer health and biotechnology 

Who you meet on the Cambridge MBA was also a vital element in Kayla Devon’s (MBA 2019) choice. 

“I looked at schools both in the US and internationally before deciding. At the MBA dinner at Queens’ College, I met a real estate developer from Australia, a military veteran from Iran and a watchmaker from Switzerland. The consumer goods and fashion industry can feel very closed, I was looking for new perspective, and I had found my opportunity,” she explains. 

With a degree in communications from Temple University, Philadelphia, followed by a career covering market trends in homebuilding and real estate, Kayla decided she would rather “do than write about”. 

“As Manager, Consumer Health for US News & World Report, I oversaw the product-market fit and revenue optimisation through ads and lead generation. While the social impact of delivering health information to our users was motivating, I was also conscientious of the need to build a financially stable business that allowed us to continue doing meaningful work,” she says. 

Beyond helping consumers navigate their healthcare decision making, Kayla became increasingly interested in how the products we use every day impact our health. She watched as sustainability and wellness trends in the food industry, such as fermentation and farm-to-table organic produce, moved over into consumer products. 

“I wanted to understand how to develop and operate a consumer brand that delivers better products for people and planet. An MBA seemed the obvious next step to build my acumen in marketing, finance, and operations.” She also enjoyed the teaching, finding the MBA classes more conversational than didactic. 

The MBA cohort were encouraged to seek answers from their peers, gaining insights into different approaches to the same problem. Through various live consulting projects, she worked on operational issues in unfamiliar industries, such as car manufacturing. From a career perspective, researching different industries in different countries proved to be very useful when faced with challenging problems. 

Since her MBA, Kayla has worked at the organic luxury make-up company Kjaer Weis and then for a biotechnology company as part of the founding team at DEINDE, a San Diego-based startup that is the first skin health line to target chronic low-level inflammation. She attributes her confidence to consistently jump into new territories to the variety of work and diverse perspectives at Cambridge Judge. 

“From homebuilding to consumer health to beauty to biotechnology, it’s been important that I have strategies in place and the confidence to face new and ambiguous problems,” she says. 

Kayla points out that at the senior executive level, both the fashion and beauty and consumer health sectors remain very male dominated. 

“Women often hit a ceiling at mid-level management, and those who make it to the executive level are commonly segmented into functions like marketing. While the barriers to entry in consumer products are low, especially through community engagement on social media, the barriers at the top of the industry for women and minorities are still very high.” 

Today, she is a Board Member at the Lifecycle Wellness and Birth Center in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, US. “I was a patient there, and I recognised the quality of care I received from my midwives was drastically different than those who received care in a physician-led hospital setting. I saw a larger opportunity in the market for this type of care. Yet, there is a global shortage of midwives. With Lifecycle, I am now working on expanding access to the midwifery model of care with the goal of improving the maternal health crisis in the US. My MBA absolutely helps with that too.” 

Beauty and fashion business leaders currently studying on the Cambridge MBA