Growing an Entrepreneurial Mindset: Why It Starts With How You Think

Nobody warns you about the identity crisis. You walk into fashion school dreaming of draping and sketching and creating beautiful things. And then somewhere in the second year, someone hands you a spreadsheet and says, "Now calculate your cost price per unit." I remember staring at that Excel file like it was written in a foreign language. My hands, the same hands that could free-sketch a coat silhouette in thirty seconds, went completely numb on the keyboard. I thought: I did not sign up for this. But here is the thing I have learned since that painful afternoon. That spreadsheet might be the most important creative tool I will ever use.

The Terrifying Space Between Art and Business

For the longest time, I kept creativity and commerce in separate boxes. Art was sacred. Business was... something other people did. Practical people. Boring people. Not me. Not the girl who spent her childhood cutting up her mother's curtains to make doll dresses. But HoGent has a way of smashing those boxes apart, and I am grateful for it, even though the process sometimes felt like being thrown into cold water.

The turning point came during a project where we had to pitch a capsule collection. Not just design it, but defend it as a viable product. Who is the customer? What is the price point? Where does it sit in the market? I fumbled through that first pitch so badly that I went home and cried into a bowl of stoofvlees. But the failure cracked something open. I started looking at designers I admired. Dries Van Noten, Marine Serre. And realized they were not just artists. They were strategists. Storytellers with business plans. Dreamers who knew how to read a balance sheet.

Creative courage is not just about making bold designs. It is about having the nerve to believe your vision deserves a place in the real world.

Rewiring the Way I Think

The shift did not happen overnight. It was slow, uncomfortable, and full of moments where I wanted to retreat back to my sketchbook and pretend the business side did not exist. But I started small. I began visiting local boutiques in Ghent, not to shop, but to study. How did they arrange their displays? What price range attracted which customers? I talked to shop owners over coffee and asked questions I would have been too proud to ask a year earlier. How do you decide what to stock? What makes something sell?

Those conversations changed me. I stopped seeing business thinking as the opposite of creativity and started seeing it as a different kind of creativity. Pricing is a design decision. Branding is storytelling. A business model is architecture. Once I made those connections, something clicked. My designs did not become less artistic. They became more intentional. More honest. I was not just making things I thought were beautiful. I was making things that could exist in someone's actual life, at a price that respected both their budget and my craft.

The hardest part of developing an entrepreneurial mindset is not learning the skills. It is letting go of the myth that creative purity requires financial ignorance. It does not. The most powerful thing I have learned at HoGent is that understanding the business of fashion does not dilute your art. It gives your art legs to stand on.

I still get nervous before pitches. My palms still sweat when I have to talk numbers instead of colours. But I no longer see that nervousness as a sign that I am in the wrong room. It is a sign that I am growing. And that terrified girl staring at the spreadsheet? She is still here. She just learned to love the spreadsheet too.