When Griselys “G” Fermin 25BBA arrived at Emory in August 2021, she was on her own for the first time. Fermin, who identifies as queer, had always wanted to wear men’s clothing. At home in Massachusetts, that wasn’t easy to do. But in Atlanta, she was free to wear what she wanted. At the time, Fermin was thin and loved the way men’s clothes fit her—until they didn’t.
“When students transition to college they start gaining weight,” Fermin explains with a smile. After putting on a few pounds, the men’s clothing she’d purchased when she arrived in Atlanta no longer fit as well as it had before. “It would be tight in the wrong places because the female anatomy gains weight in different places than men,” Fermin says. “What that meant for me was that men’s clothing would no longer have a relaxed fit in the places that mattered.”
Shortly after, Fermin matriculated into Goizueta’s undergraduate Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program in the fall of 2023. She had been interested in entrepreneurship since high school, so she took a job as a front desk attendant at The Hatchery, Emory University’s Center for Innovation. Though she wasn’t formally a part of one of The Hatchery’s programs, she was surrounded by student innovators and entrepreneurs, as well as the faculty and staff who support them.
That’s where I put two and two together. I just thought, why not have men’s clothing that fits the female body?
Griselys “G” Fermin 25BBA
At the beginning of 2024, Fermin took what she’d learned from her first semester of business classes—including a class on entrepreneurship taught by Andrea Hershatter, associate professor in the practice of organization and management and senior associate dean of undergraduate education—and got to work. She conducted competitor analysis and spoke to several manufacturers. By the time she was accepted into the Hatchery’s Incubator program—which provides student founders like Fermin with training, mentorship and seed funding to help them develop their ventures and get them launched—in fall 2024, Fermin had formed a network at The Hatchery and produced a minimally viable product.
“G was great to work with,” says Ben Garrett, director of The Hatchery, Center for Innovation. “She is curious and diligent. She took feedback seriously and was able to take what she was learning at The Hatchery and quickly put it into practice to help her move her venture forward.”
She conducted consumer research where she discovered formally what she knew anecdotally—being a woman shopping for men’s clothing is an uncomfortable experience. “The looks you get when shopping in the men’s section,” she says. “It’s definitely a real problem.” In addition to The Hatchery program, Fermin chose business classes that made sense for her, including a senior seminar taught by branding advisor Molly Dickinson, co-founder & creative director of INVINCIBLE INC., where Fermin learned how to use the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s website to home in on a name for her company.
The target audience for her clothing company are consumers like her—masculine-presenting women who are queer and Black—affectionately known as “studs” in queer nomenclature. A light bulb went off. Fermin had the name for her company: “Studded.” While other companies cater to a similar target audience—including gender-neutral brand Dapper Boi and menswear-inspired Kirrin Finch—Studded’s focus on streetwear caters to a younger demographic. “Casual yet quality clothes that you can just throw on and feel confident in yourself,” Fermin explains. Studded drops its first product—a shirt—this summer. Fermin is currently beta testing other pieces.
In addition to The Hatchery and her business classes, Fermin also received help from her classmates. Ezinne Ifi 25BBA, who Fermin met during an innovation senior seminar, is helping Fermin create Studded’s brand playbook, a guide that defines Studded’s identity and direction. Melany Rojas 24BBA is working with Fermin to develop Studded’s social media presence, and Jasmine Mendoza 25BBA helped Fermin mockup some of her early shirt designs. “I’ve definitely built a great network of talented peers who’ve helped fill my areas of weakness,” she says.
Fermin, whose day job is as a product manager at an Atlanta communications company, has been working on Studded in her spare time. She admits that the process from ideation to product drop has taken longer than she expected, but she is committed to putting out products she’s proud of. “I don’t want to create clothing that doesn’t solve a real problem,” she explains. “There are people that need this. We don’t have to settle for men’s clothing that doesn’t fit us.”
Inspired by Fermin’s journey? Learn how The Hatchery helps entrepreneurs build and launch purpose-driven ventures.
