Kerri BridgmanYou’d be surprised how much fashion and roadwork have in common. It took me a couple of months to realize how much they overlapped.
One involves designers, models and mood boards. The other unions, hard hats and hot asphalt. At their core, both industries rely on one critical skill: reverse-engineering a vision.
In roadwork, you start with the end in mind—how traffic should flow, where safety needs to be prioritized, and when people can access their homes or offices again. Everything is timed down to the minute, with materials, teams, and machines lined up in a precise order to keep things moving.
In fashion, it’s the same. Before a single stitch is sewn, we’re already thinking about the delivery window, the launch calendar, the shipping mode, and how it all connects to the customer’s buying season. You work backward from the in-store date and ask: When does the order window need to close? When does fabric need to ship? When does the first fit need to happen? When does production need to wrap? Usually this starts about a year before the product is set to land in store.
In both worlds, success starts with understanding the end user.
You plan around their experience, whether it’s someone commuting to work or school without delays or a woman trying on the perfect dress in time for summer vacation. Then you layer in the strategy: materials, manufacturers, deadlines, logistics, & budget.
What I’ve learned is that creativity is only half the story. Whether I’m coordinating a fashion line or helping to manage a construction site, the magic happens in the systems.
The planning. The pacing. The ability to hold the vision while managing the moving parts.
Because real innovation doesn’t come from chaos—it comes from clear, grounded execution.
And that’s true whether you’re paving highways or launching a new collection.