Zicklin MBA Students Travel to Tuscany for Textile Consulting Project

The popular image of business consultants is that they travel for work frequently, to places like Boston, Chicago, or maybe Miami. It’s not too often you hear about them visiting Italy on a consulting gig.  

Yet that’s exactly what a group of MBA students in the Zicklin School’s business consulting capstone course got to do recently for a project assisting Manteco, a textile business based in Prato, a medieval city just 16 miles from Florence in Italy’s famed Tuscany region. Manteco, a family firm specializing in recycling old wool into textiles and selling it to stores and brands in Europe and North America, was looking to increase its share of the U.S. market. 

For the project, a team of five Zicklin students partnered with master’s students from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, an Italian university set near the Austrian border where the Zicklin School has a dual-degree program. “It was a great opportunity to learn about communicating across borders and cultures,” says Lexane Adrion (MBA, ’24), an Evening MBA student who co-led the Zicklin-Bolzano team. “I work for an Italian company, so that was one of the biggest benefits for me.”  

Her co-leader Rebecca Wingle (MBA, ’24), a Full-Time MBA student, appreciated the opportunity to conduct market research on sustainability—a Manteco core value. In addition to its recycled wool line, the company also produces low-impact virgin wool according to guidelines for humanely rearing and shearing sheep, minimizing waste and pollution when producing yarns, and more.  

Both women, who graduated this past May, say they landed their current jobs primarily thanks to their Zicklin School experience. “Practicing public speaking and putting together decks definitely helped me move into business planning,” says Lexane, who is a strategic business planner at Gucci. For her part, Rebecca used the Graduate Career Management Center’s job portal, Handshake, to apply for a summer internship last year at a boutique marketing and consulting firm. Not only did she get it, but she just started a full-time position at the same company.  

Distinguished lecturer Anthony Farina, who runs the business consulting capstone program, says the high caliber of Zicklin MBA students made it difficult to choose candidates for this project. “Thirty-one students applied for five spots on the Manteco team,” he notes. “We had such strong backups we could easily have staffed two teams.”  

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