As Huckberry expanded into wholesale and physical retail, the outdoor lifestyle brand faced two difficult questions: how to position its growing portfolio of house brands across different shopping environments, and how to attract younger consumers without alienating the loyal customer base that had built the company.
During the spring 2026 semester, McIntire students were tasked with helping to find the answers.
Derick Davis
When Professor Derick Davis assigned his Marketing Research students a project with Huckberry, co-founded by Commerce alum Andy Forch (McIntire ’07), he wasn’t handing them a simulation. He was handing them a live business problem that Huckberry’s leadership was actively trying to solve. Davis divided the class into teams, gave them a research framework, and let them run.
For Davis, forcing students to operate inside that uncertainty was the entire point. “When working with a real client, this integration is even more meaningful, as students are exposed to the tensions and opportunities when their recommendations hit the practical realities of the sponsor firm,” he says.
By the end of the semester, Huckberry had not only received actionable research; it had begun acting on it. For students, seeing those recommendations move beyond the classroom fundamentally changed how they viewed the work.
Michelle Kang
“It was awesome to know that the work we were doing in class could actually impact a company,” says Michelle Kang (McIntire ’26), a recent Commerce grad who concentrated in IT and Management.
Navigating the Messiness of Data
Getting to that impact required students to move fast through unfamiliar and often uncomfortable territory.
Ryan Seidensticker
Teams began with AI-assisted digital interviews, conducting 60 to 80 open-ended conversations with consumers. Drawing clean insights from unstructured dialogue proved to be the first major hurdle. For Ryan Seidensticker (McIntire ’26), a Statistics double-major comfortable with quantitative frameworks, the qualitative phase was disorienting. The challenge of extracting specific findings from sprawling conversations, he says, often felt like “a shot in the dark.”
To ground those early findings, students moved to Qualtrics surveys that generated roughly 200 responses each. But crafting unbiased survey language turned out to be harder than anyone expected. “Professor Davis taught us a lot of things to think about in terms of question order and the way they’re phrased so that they’re not leading to a particular answer,” Kang says. From there, teams applied consumer segmentation and A/B testing to sharpen their conclusions.
George Wray
As the data accumulated, students needed a way to separate meaningful patterns from noise. Recent graduate George Wray (McIntire ’26) credits a methodology Davis introduced early: backward market research, an approach that starts with the specific decision a company needs to make and works backward to identify exactly what data is required. “It kept us from drowning,” Wray says.
Kieran Warner
For Kieran Warner, a rising fourth-year double-majoring in Commerce (with a concentration in Marketing) and Media Studies, the project fundamentally changed how she approached research. “I thought initially that asking very specific, detailed questions would be useful,” she says, “but actually starting wider and asking very general questions about consumer behavior proved to be a lot more insightful. It’s easier to capture on a broad scale first and then narrow it down over time.”
Where Recommendations Meet Reality
When the teams presented their findings to Forch, the convergence of their conclusions was striking.
Andy Forch
“The recommendations were actionable,” Forch says. “I didn’t hear 10 different things. The teams were coalescing and having similar ideas.” On the brand architecture question, student research validated a direction Huckberry’s leadership had been quietly considering. On the demographic challenge, students surfaced potential brand ambassadors and untapped marketing channels. Forch found the recommendations compelling enough to immediately share with his internal marketing team for implementation.
Students had not just completed a class project. They had influenced the strategy of a growing national brand.
From the Classroom to the Consumer
The experience reshaped how many students thought about research and decision-making. Seidensticker, heading into a credit risk consulting role, says the project gave him a sharper sense of how to use AI to accelerate business analysis and a new respect for the limits of quantitative instincts alone. Kang took away something she considers broadly transferable: “The deep empathy required by consumer research is a huge skill that you can use literally anytime in your life.”
Forch hopes to continue the partnership with his alma mater, giving future students the same opportunity to test their thinking against live strategic challenges. What the students delivered, he says, mirrored the kind of alignment professional research teams often spend far longer trying to achieve.
They got there in a single semester.
