Unlocking Insights: A Conversation with Maryam Garg

Thanks to UCI ANTrepreneur Center for this valuable information about entrepreneurship:

Meet the ANTrepreneur Center External Committee: Maryam Garg

In this special interview series, we are proud to highlight the incredible members of the ANTrepreneur Center External Committee (ACE) and discuss their entrepreneurial experiences, their reasons for joining the ACE, and their best advice for aspiring student entrepreneurs.

This article’s featured ACE member is Maryam Garg, Founder of Retail Tech Consulting LLC. Maryam is a successful entrepreneur and dedicated educator in the field of entrepreneurship who is committed to nurturing the next generation of business leaders. As the former Director of Blackstone LaunchpPad at USC and as a current Principal Venture Consultant at the UCI ANTrepreneur Center, Maryam has and continues to collaborate closely with aspiring entrepreneurs, offering guidance to help them transform their ideas into flourishing businesses.

As a graduate class project at USC, Maryam launched MODMASK, a sustainable facemask company with an emphasis on comfort and style. This successful business was featured in a Harvard Business Review case study and led to Maryam landing speaking engagements at top business schools worldwide. Prior to MODMASK, she led multi-disciplinary teams across product strategy and marketing to launch several high-profile ecommerce products at Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. Recently, Maryam was elected as a board member at The Search Institute, a leading research institute focused on creating positive youth development outcomes and advancing equity.

To offer her professional insights and invaluable advice to UCI student entrepreneurs, Maryam recently met with Ryan Foland, Director of the ANTrepreneur Center, to share her story.

Ryan: Ahoy Maryam! Thank you for sitting down with me and introducing yourself to the ANTrepreneur family. To kick us off, can you share how you got involved in entrepreneurship?

Maryam: Hi Ryan; thank you for having me! My transition into entrepreneurship started at Macys.com, where I began my career as a digital marketer. Ecommerce was just becoming relevant but was still in its infancy in terms of the conveniences available to customers. I realized that social media would ultimately be a bigger opportunity than search marketing and pitched the need to build out social media as a sales and customer service channel. However, the bigger prize at the time was to figure out how to compete effectively with Amazon. Recognizing that Macy’s biggest advantage was its store infrastructure, I became an intrapreneur who conceived and established first-to-market products that leveraged stores as a strength of their ecommerce business. In this vein, I launched services such as “buy online pickup in store” and “digital try-on.”

Additionally, I was working with AI imaging companies over a decade ago when most of them were ahead of the market timing. My desire for a more autonomous lifestyle inspired me to become...