During my product strategy internship at EssilorLuxottica (Oakley), I explored how the brand could evolve its product language for a new generation of consumers.

Oakley already holds significant cultural relevance among Gen Z, particularly across fashion, music, nightlife, and emerging performance cultures. Cultural desirability, however, does not always translate into product adoption. Many younger consumers admire the brand but struggle to find products that reflect their face architecture, identity, styling, and understanding of performance.

The project investigated how Oakley could preserve its technical credibility and unmistakable edge while expanding the number of people who could see themselves in its products.

Gen Z wants the Oakley image, but cannot always enter the product portfolio.

The challenge was not primarily awareness. Oakley was already visible and culturally desirable. The gap appeared between brand aspiration and product conversion.

The existing portfolio often over-indexed on traditional Oakley codes: larger proportions, strongly masculine forms, and a narrower visual definition of performance. At the same time, a new generation increasingly associated performance with identity, self-expression, adaptability, and movement between cultural environments.

Internal generational analysis positioned Gen X around protection and technical proof, Millennials around wellness and lifestyle performance, and Gen Z around identity and self-expression — and identified a gap between Gen Z's connection with the Oakley image and the limited number of products speaking directly to them.

How might Oakley expand the meaning of performance for a generation that sees identity and self-expression as part of performance?

I began with an observation: Oakley appeared highly relevant in Gen Z visual culture, but many products still reflected older assumptions about the performance consumer. That raised questions beyond gender alone.

• Who is the product physically designed to fit?
• What proportions communicate performance?
• Can technical credibility look sleek rather than armored?
• Can one product move between sport, fashion, streetwear, and nightlife?
• How can Oakley evolve without losing what makes it recognizable?

I developed this strategic perspective as my internship capstone, combining portfolio thinking, cultural research, and future design strategy.

• Studying generational changes in the meaning of performance
• Examining the gap between cultural relevance and product adoption
• Assessing portfolio fit for smaller and narrower face architectures
• Researching Gen Z styling, fashion, sport, and nightlife references
• Developing moodboards and future design territories
• Translating research into product strategy principles
• Building the final strategic narrative for internal presentation

Across my broader internship, I also collaborated with design and engineering teams on product briefs, storytelling, and go-to-market positioning.

Oakley does not need to lose its edge. It needs more ways to express edge.

The opportunity was not to make Oakley quieter, softer, or less technical. It was to preserve the qualities that made the brand powerful while allowing those qualities to appear through different scales, forms, identities, and cultural contexts — moving the project from demographic targeting toward a broader evolution of the design language.

From armored performance to fluid performance

• Smaller and more precise proportions
• Sculpted but lightweight forms
• Sleek technical construction
• Gender-fluid styling
• Sport-to-nightlife mobility
• Club culture and alternative performance
• Expressive rather than traditionally masculine power

The intention was not to replace Oakley's existing visual language, but to expand the portfolio's range of expression.

The project resulted in a future-facing product strategy connecting:

The final framework proposed a broader expression of Oakley's existing strengths: performance, experimentation, technical credibility, and cultural edge. It was presented internally as a strategic perspective on how the brand could build deeper product relevance with the next generation.

Creative freelancers have significant freedom but little organizational support. Alongside their craft, they manage pricing, proposals, taxes, contracts, clients, marketing, and unstable income alone — a company of one, running without a back office.

The scale of that gap is the reason it matters. Independent work is no longer a niche arrangement; it is becoming the default shape of a creative career, and the tooling has not followed.

Gig work is usually discussed as one category. It is not. We mapped it as a spectrum of agency and deliberately chose the end furthest from platform control, where the worker decides everything and therefore carries everything.

We ran market research, systems mapping of the platform–worker–client–regulator ecosystem, interviews, and co-design sessions with a photographer, a social media manager, a painter, and a fashion stylist. Four challenges recurred across all of them.

The problem was not a lack of agency. It was unsupported agency.

This reframed the AI question. Instead of asking what AI could answer for freelancers, we asked what if AI did not answer the question, but connected you to the person who could. Generic pricing ranges and tool lists are not what they needed; what someone charged last month, which tools peers actually rely on, and an introduction to the right person are.

Folio is an AI-powered community platform built for creative freelancers to connect, share knowledge, and grow their network. We walked it through a single user — a photographer moving from Berlin to New York with three years of experience and no local network.

We closed on where this could live inside the Microsoft ecosystem: a LinkedIn profile surface carrying matched peers, a toolkit showing what similar freelancers use, and a collaboration board of open projects nearby — reaching the roughly 54 million US freelancers who are not on LinkedIn Services today.

The project resulted in an end-to-end mobile concept showing how AI could support creative independence while keeping human relationships and peer knowledge at the center — positioning AI as the missing infrastructure layer rather than a replacement for the freelancer's agency.

The work carried past the classroom: it resulted in an official LinkedIn add-on developed by the Microsoft team, and both decks were requested afterwards by the LinkedIn design team.

Both decks were requested by the LinkedIn design team after the project.

Midterm review AI for gig workers — research & framing PDF ↗ Final review Folio — concept, walkthrough & next steps PDF ↗

The client wanted to expand into new industries but faced an extremely broad opportunity landscape.

The question was not simply which markets were growing. It was which opportunities aligned with the client's existing portfolio, capabilities, regional advantages, and long-term ambition.

I supported the project from initial opportunity assessment through final strategic recommendation. We began with a broad universe of industries and narrowed it to approximately ten sectors using market attractiveness, strategic fit, portfolio synergies, and investment feasibility.

I led detailed analyses of selected sectors:

• Market size, growth, and financial attractiveness
• Competitor and value-chain analysis
• Consumer and industry trends
• Portfolio connections
• Potential partners and entry models
• Belief audits to test internal assumptions

One of my primary deep dives focused on jewelry, where I assessed category growth, competitive dynamics, potential partnerships, and the client's ability to build a differentiated position.

An attractive market is not yet an investment strategy.

The strongest opportunities were not simply the fastest-growing sectors. They combined external momentum with a credible path to entry and the ability to strengthen the wider portfolio.

The work resulted in two priority sectors, potential partnership models, business-plan implications, and a phased North Star roadmap through 2035. Final recommendations were presented to senior leadership to inform the client's long-term investment direction.

Sustainability activities existed across the company, but responsibilities were distributed among different departments with limited coordination.

Unclear ownership, fragmented processes, and inconsistent data flows made it difficult to translate ESG ambitions into operational action and credible external reporting.

I helped assess the current sustainability operating model and identify gaps across organization, governance, and processes, running multiple workstreams single-handedly over four months.

• Mapping sustainability roles and responsibilities
• Interviewing stakeholders across departments
• Identifying ownership gaps and duplicated activities
• Redesigning governance and decision-making processes
• Clarifying collaboration between the central team and business functions
• Reorganizing sustainability data collection and reporting
• Assessing the process for identifying and applying for external green financing
• Researching expectations from institutions such as IFC and EBRD

Sustainability reporting is an output of the operating model, not a standalone activity.

Credible reporting depends on clear ownership, reliable data, repeatable processes, cross-functional coordination, and executive accountability.

The project produced a future sustainability operating model and implementation roadmap connecting:

The recommendations gave leadership a more integrated system for managing sustainability across the company.

Traditional shampoo advertising in Turkey often relied on narrow representations of beauty and femininity.

The challenge was to create an inclusive mainstream campaign that felt authentic to Ebrar Karakurt, relevant to Elidor consumers, and credible for the brand.

I contributed across campaign brainstorming, narrative development, content creation, execution, and stakeholder coordination. The campaign connected Elidor's message of confidence with Ebrar's athletic strength, resilience, individuality, and LGBTQ+ visibility.

Inclusion could not be added around the campaign. It needed to shape the story from within.

The partnership worked because Ebrar did not simply deliver the campaign's values. She already embodied them.

The final campaign placed an openly LGBTQ+ national athlete at the center of a traditional mainstream beauty category, expanding how strength, confidence, and femininity could be represented in Turkish advertising.

Milk, meat, livestock, and feed markets influence one another. A policy that improves dairy profitability may also change feed demand, livestock slaughter, meat production, imports, and consumer prices.

Our four-person team developed a system-dynamics model connecting:

• Feed production and imports
• Dairy and meat prices
• Livestock populations
• Production and demand
• Slaughter, imports, and exports

We tested the model through unit checks, base runs, extreme-condition testing, sensitivity analysis, and historical comparison.

Short-term price controls addressed symptoms, not system structure.

No single intervention could stabilize a system shaped by feed dependency, livestock populations, producer behavior, and delayed feedback.

We developed a coordinated policy proposal combining:

The project taught me to use models not only for prediction, but as spaces for testing strategic decisions before they are implemented.

I started out analytical. I studied Industrial Engineering, learned to explain complicated problems with math and statistics, and spent my first working years at BCG structuring ambiguous questions into strategies that senior stakeholders could act on. But I wanted to build things as much as analyse them, so instead of an MBA I came to Parsons for Strategic Design & Management — a program about designing the systems and processes behind design itself.

Today I'm on the Product Strategy team at EssilorLuxottica (Oakley), working on launches for the 2028 season: writing briefs with the design team, tracking how individual products perform across geographies and feeding that back into design decisions, and coordinating with the apparel team in Milan. It confirmed something I had suspected for a while — fashion is where I want to be, at the point where numbers, product, and culture meet.

I'm a professional aerial artist. I've always kept this running in parallel with my working life, never as a break from it — it's where I find my motivation, meet extraordinary people, and keep opening new horizons for myself.