Zicklin MBA Students Assess Trump’s Trade War in Real Time

If you’re a foreign company exporting goods to the United States, how do you make sense of President Trump’s tariffs? For the Tivoli Group, a luxury leather manufacturer based in Calenzano, near Florence, Italy, the answer was to draw on the (free) expertise of graduate students from the Zicklin School’s MBA program.

For their business consulting capstone course, MBA students from New York partnered with master’s students from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, an Italian university near the Austrian border with which the Zicklin School has a dual-degree program. 

Five Zicklin students, under the team leadership of marketing student Elena Barilla (MBA, ’25), focused on developing a tariff-simulation tool that would enable the Italian company to leverage potential customs advantages over their Chinese competitors while negotiating with U.S. luxury brands. 

For the same reason, the Tivoli Group also wanted to gauge what American consumers, especially women, think of Italian-made products. Accordingly, the Bozen-Bolzano students designed and distributed a survey asking U.S. women aged between 25 and 50 about their perception regarding the value of “Made in Italy” versus “Made in China,” and a control group without any country-of-origin label. 

“We advised Tivoli to shift their marketing narrative from ‘Avoid tariffs with Tivoli’ to something with more longevity: capitalizing on the more stable geopolitical relationship between the U.S. and Italy versus the U.S. and China, promoting the value of Italian craftsmanship, and so on,” said Elena, the team leader.

The 16-week course included a week during which the Zicklin students visited Italy to meet personally with the Bozen-Bolzano master’s candidates and to visit Tivoli’s headquarters and production site. At the end of their joint teamwork, the Italian students visited the Zicklin School to deliver the final presentation and take a deep dive into New York City’s finance and international business sectors.

Professor Michael Nippa, who is head of Bozen-Bolzano’s Business Consulting Lab course (the counterpart to the Zicklin School’s consulting capstone course), said that the top two executives at Tivoli Group were “impressed” by the students’ results, “both regarding the simulation and calculations of the effects of different tariffs, as well as the appreciation female U.S. customers have for Made in Italy products.” The CEO stayed well beyond the scheduled presentation time, Nippa added, and even invited the American students to an upcoming New York conference for designers and producers: “All signs of high recognition for the work of our students.”

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