There is a specific kind of learning that no classroom reproduces: the learning that happens when a student sits inside a working company and watches how a garment actually moves from a buyer’s requirement to a finished export order. Two Fashion Design students at Parul Institute of Design, Rishika Reddy and Namrata Bakaliya, went looking for exactly that. Their internships, one in the merchandising department of a major export house and one in the design studio of a couture label, are a useful window into what internships add to a fashion education and why students who take them seriously build a real edge.
This feature sits alongside the documented fashion outcomes from Parul Institute of Design, including Khushi Dehade’s placement as a Fashion Designer at Mix Bunch and Dipali Gupta’s move from a couture internship into production at Zebein. The interior design side of the faculty is covered through Priyanka Soni’s placement at Livspace, with the broader institutional record at Parul University’s placement record.
Rishika Reddy: learning the business side inside an export house
Rishika Reddy is a BDes Fashion Design student who interned in the merchandising department at Shahi Exports. Merchandising is the primary front of the garment business on the export side, and interning there helped in learning the exact juxtaposition of design and business that goes beyond a classroom!
- The sample development process – Working under a Senior Merchandiser, Rishika learned how garment samples are prepared to client specifications, and how each step demands precision and coordination across people. Sample development is where an export order succeeds or fails, and seeing it up close taught her how standards and client satisfaction drive the entire process.
- Buyer requirements and communication – She learned how merchandisers meet client expectations across the export and domestic markets, including buyer-manufacturer communication, product specification, and quality requirements. This is how commercial literacy plays a major role in outshining a designer who is scaling progressively at all levels – from idea to delivering an order!
- Multi-faceted Communication – Communication plays a major role in sampling, production, quality control and end-to-end delivery of an order, as one single error can lead to an entire change in the concept. At her internships, she quietly observed how designers collaborate with merchandising professionals and how seamlessly the chain works!
Rishika has already realised that she hasn’t secured a campus placement yet, and that’s when she took up an internship that gave her the right foundation. From learning how the manufacturing chain operates to business skills, she has invested all those learnings in her portfolio, and hence it’s a combination of theory + practical knowledge!
Namrata Bakaliya: design, sustainability, and the digital toolkit
Namrata Bakaliya, a Fashion Design student at the Faculty of Design, took a different route into industry readiness, interning as a Fashion Design Intern at Sajnaari, her first hands-on experience applying academic knowledge in a professional design setting. Her interests cluster around design, sustainable fashion, fashion illustration, craftwork, textiles, and collection development, and the internship let her test that academic grounding against real design work.
- The full design process. Through her coursework and internship, Namrata built command of fashion illustration, textile studies, garment construction, draping, pattern making, and fashion forecasting, covering the design process from conceptualisation to execution. Her Final Graduation Project, a complete collection taken from concept through mood board, fabric exploration, sampling, and final execution, taught her the planning and time management that creative work actually requires.
- Digital fluency. Recognising modern industry requirements, Namrata developed proficiency in digital design tools including CLO 3D, Adobe Photoshop, and Canva, enabling her to create digital fashion illustrations, virtual garment simulations, visual presentations, and portfolio layouts. This digital toolkit is increasingly non-negotiable in a fashion industry moving toward virtual sampling and 3D design.
- Learning to present the work. Like many design students, Namrata found that her strongest early obstacle was not designing but articulating her design ideas with confidence. Through portfolio and presentation discussion sessions, she learned to explain her work, defend her decisions, and stress the research behind her concepts, which is the skill that ultimately carries a designer through interviews.
Namrata’s internship at Sajnaari is her entry point into the industry rather than a finished outcome, and framing it honestly matters. She is building the technical range, digital fluency, and presentation confidence that the fashion industry rewards, on top of a curriculum that gave her the fundamentals. Industry readiness at the student stage looks like exactly this: not a completed placement, but an accumulating base of exposure, skill, and confidence.
What internships add that a curriculum cannot
Read together, the two experiences make a clear case for why internships matter in fashion education specifically. A curriculum can teach garment construction, textile science, and design theory rigorously, and the programme at Parul Institute of Design does. But it cannot fully reproduce the texture of a live buyer requirement, the coordination pressure of a real sample deadline, or the commercial logic of an export order. Internships supply that missing dimension.
- Bridging theory and practice. Both students describe internships as the mechanism that closed the gap between what they learned in university and what the industry demands, turning abstract knowledge into applied understanding.
- Revealing the breadth of the industry. Rishika’s merchandising exposure and Namrata’s design work show that fashion is not one job but many, spanning merchandising, design, production, sustainability, and digital design, and internships help students find where they fit.
- Building confidence and communication. Both found that industry exposure, and the presentation practice around it, built the confidence and communication skills that classroom talent alone does not guarantee.
How the programme supports the internship route
Fashion Design sits within the Faculty of Design at Parul University, an institution holding NAAC A++ accreditation at CGPA 3.55 and Category 1 status with Grant of Graded Autonomy. The programme is built to push students toward exactly the kind of industry exposure Rishika and Namrata pursued, through academic projects, competitions, workshops, and the annual Fashion Week graduating showcase, all of which double as portfolio and readiness builders. Internships across export houses, couture labels, and design studios extend that readiness into live industry settings.
Placement is one destination this readiness leads to, supported by the university’s recruitment strength, recognised by ASSOCHAM as the Best University in Placements for three consecutive years with 2,200+ recruiting companies. But it is not the only one. For students who would rather build their own label than join an existing brand, PIERC, the Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre, offers an incubation route, having supported 254 startups including consumer and lifestyle brands. The industry readiness that internships build serves both destinations equally: whether a student aims to be hired or to build something of their own, the exposure, skill, and confidence are the same foundation.
FAQs
What do fashion design students gain from internships at Parul Institute of Design?
It includes practical, client facing and industry driven approach that goes beyond a classroom. Rishika Reddy’s internship at Shahi Exports taught her the end to end process of sample development, business requirements, buyer-manufacturer communication, product knowledge, and quality assurance. Meanwhile, Namrata Bakaliya’s internship taught her the techno-creative side of fashion designing. She firmly mastered CLO 3D, Adobe Photoshop, and Canva. Both of them had revealed that they’ve mastered a lot many things that an industry demands.
What is fashion merchandising and what does a merchandising internship involve?
Fashion merchandising is the commercial function that translates a buyer's requirements into a producible, on-specification, on-time garment order, sitting at the intersection of design and business. Based on Rishika Reddy's documented internship in the merchandising department at Shahi Exports, a merchandising internship involves learning the sample development process, where garment samples are prepared to client specifications with precision and coordination across multiple people. It covers understanding buyer requirements and how merchandisers meet client expectations across export and domestic markets, including buyer-manufacturer communication, product specification, and quality requirements. Besides this, it covered cross department communication that includes merchandising vocabulary, production, sample finalisation and quality control.
What digital skills do fashion design students need for the industry?
The peak of fashion designing is increasing day by day and digital fluency is making a mark beyond traditional skills. Based on the experience of Namrata, she said, she mastered CLO 3D for virtual garment learning, Adobe Photoshop for illustration and Canva for better visual presentations. Digital fluency is becoming non-negotiable according to her experience as virtual sampling and 3D design is speeding up the design cycle at all levels. Alongside digital tools, students need command of the traditional design process including fashion illustration, textile studies, garment construction, draping, pattern making, and fashion forecasting, all of which the Fashion Design programme at Parul Institute of Design covers from conceptualisation through execution.
Why are internships important in fashion education even before placement?
Internships build industry readiness that benefits a student regardless of when placement comes. Both Rishika Reddy and Namrata Bakaliya used internships to gain practical exposure that their curriculum could not fully reproduce, even though neither had secured a campus placement at the time of their reports. The value of an internship at the student stage is an accumulating foundation: exposure to how companies actually operate, a clearer sense of which fashion career path fits, and the confidence and communication skills that come from working in a professional setting. Rishika's merchandising exposure at Shahi Exports and Namrata's design work at Sajnaari, combined with self-directed portfolio building and industry research, represent the kind of preparation that tends to convert into opportunity over time. The industry readiness internships build serves both destinations a fashion education leads to: placement into an established brand, or building an independent label through a route such as PIERC, the Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre at Parul University.
