On Tuesday and Wednesday October 7 and 8, 2014, the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design (TMFD) will host Walter T. Wilhelm, chairman of Walter Wilhelm Associates, LLC, a Utah-based boutique consulting organization that helps retail and brand clients refine “front-end” processes. As a management consulting firm, WWA focuses on empowering apparel, footwear, and retail executives with the strategies, processes, and technologies that create tangible business value and sustainable competitive advantage. Their team’s deep industry expertise and their best practice knowledge base built from hundreds of successful projects around the globe, make WWA unique among consulting agencies. Their experts in the apparel, footwear, and interiors markets offer valuable domain expertise from product development, to supply chain, to retailing.
WWA founder Walter Wilhelm is a serial entrepreneur recognized as one of the most innovative and "connected" executives in the soft goods industry. He is one of the pioneers in creating and implementing technology to streamline the product design and development processes. Over the course of his successful career he has held senior positions in retailing, manufacturing and technology sales and development. Wilhelm’s extensive experience domestically as well as internationally includes opening six offices in Europe and four in Asia. In addition to leading WWA, Wilhelm was a co-founder of Microdynamics; served as President of Animated Images (Ai); co-founded Wilhelm-Leslie Associates; and was General Manager of Hughes Aircraft Company's Apparel & Footwear Automation Systems Division. Wilhelm holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Management and a Master of Business Administration in Finance from the University of Southern California.
Uniquely positioned to help clients navigate through the front-end maze, from design concept to first production, WWA identifies operations obstacles and bottlenecks and designs production systems to increase efficiency and responsiveness. Their industry experts provide much-needed process and technology application domain expertise in this highly specialized area, which is rare in traditional consulting organizations. Frank H. Schneider, III, Executive Vice President and CFO for Jockey International, Inc. has praised WWA’s team as “…professional personnel that understand apparel industry processes and product lifecycle management technology. Because of their talent and unique approach they quickly become part of the team during implementation of new systems.” Denimatrix President Carlos Arias applauded WWA for being “…an integral part of our supply chain strategy and process technology initiatives. Their value goes beyond just the project at hand because they think outside the box for ways to help their clients be successful.”
While on the UNL campus, Walter Wilhelm will speak before several TMFD classes and will meet with faculty members and students in small group conversations. At 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday October 7, Wilhelm will offer a free public presentation in the Room 11 auditorium on the lower level of the Home Economics Building on east campus. In his presentation Wilhelm will provide background on himself and on Walter Wilhelm Associates, and will address challenges facing the soft goods industries today, including the question Made in the USA: can apparel manufacturing ever return to the US at any kind of scale?
UNL faculty and students are invited to join TMFD classes in which Walter Wilhelm will speak, on a space available basis. For more information about his schedule, please contact the department office at 402-272-2911.