Four years after the Gilbert Family Foundation committed $10 million to Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design, the figure resurfaced in coverage this year looking like a fresh announcement.
It wasn’t one. The five-year commitment dates to 2021, when footwear designer D’Wayne Edwards was leading the effort to reopen Detroit’s Lewis College of Business as a design-focused HBCU. Target joined separately as a founding partner. Other companies have since added money, equipment, internships and dedicated programmes of their own.
What’s changed is that four years have passed. That gap is what makes the college worth a second look — not the size of the original grant, but what’s been built around it since.
Pensole Lewis now trains students in footwear, apparel, colour and materials, and product marketing, with a corporate network spanning retail, technology and manufacturing. Students meet the companies that dominate those industries before they’ve graduated. For a Black designer, that kind of access can compress a career path that has traditionally run through expensive schools, personal connections and geographic proximity to a handful of creative hubs. For the companies, it’s a concentrated talent pool in a field where Black representation is still remarkably thin.
Jobs will be the first thing anyone measures. Patents, royalty agreements and graduate-founded companies are the harder, more revealing numbers — the ones that show whether a designer keeps earning after the first product ships.
A Detroit Business School, Repurposed
Violet T. Lewis founded what became the Lewis College of Business in 1928, training Black women for commercial and administrative work at a time when universities and employers alike shut them out. The school was part of a wider Black business infrastructure in Detroit — a place where students learned to find work and run offices in an economy that mostly refused them both. It closed in 2015.
Edwards had spent a career watching a related gap. He entered the footwear industry in 1989, rose to senior design roles at Nike, and worked on the Air Jordan XXI and XXII before founding Pensole Design Academy to train and place designers directly into the industry.
Michigan lawmakers approved reopening Lewis College in 2021. What emerged combined Lewis’s legacy with Edwards’s industry playbook.
The Gilbert Family Foundation put in $10 million over five years, part of Dan and Jennifer Gilbert’s broader $500 million pledge to Detroit’s economic recovery. The foundation frames it as an investment in mobility for residents facing systemic barriers. Target’s involvement came through its Racial Equity Action and Change strategy.
Today’s Associate of Applied Science in Design lets students specialize in footwear, apparel, or colour and materials, and the college says scholarship support reaches everyone enrolled in the two-year degree.
It’s easy to underestimate how much is riding on a footwear-focused curriculum until you consider what the job actually involves. Someone has to turn a sketch into something that can be manufactured, priced and sold — decisions about fit, materials, construction, and, less visibly, which customer the company is even picturing when it makes those calls.
The Partner List Doubles as the Curriculum
Foot Locker, Hanes, MillerKnoll, New Balance, Designer Brands and Logitech sit among Pensole Lewis’s strategic partners. Nike, Adidas, Puma, Jordan Brand, Levi’s, Vans, Converse, Google and Autodesk appear as programme partners.
That’s not a network most 20-year-olds build on their own.
Design hiring runs on things a transcript doesn’t show: a portfolio, familiarity with the right software, the ability to respond to a creative brief the way an employer expects. A gifted student can still walk into an interview without knowing any of that. Pensole Lewis puts working designers and executives into the classroom to close exactly that gap — reviewing portfolios, shaping projects, scouting recruits early.
Edwards had already run this playbook once. Pensole Design Academy says it’s placed more than 800 alumni into roles at Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Brooks, Vans and Puma, and Pensole Lewis inherited both those relationships and Edwards’s standing in the industry.
This year it became clearer than ever that we need to make a change, especially in the creative industry where lack of diversity is a fact and a real issue. — Dr. D’Wayne Edwards
The college hasn’t published comparable outcomes for its own degree students yet — its first classes are still early in their careers, so placement counts alone wouldn’t mean much. Starting pay, promotions and industry tenure will be the numbers worth watching as the alumni base grows.
An Industry Built on Black Culture, Designed by Almost Nobody Black
The 2019 AIGA Design Census put Black representation among designers at roughly 3 percent, a number the MIT Media Lab has cited in describing the field’s imbalance. Adidas has separately said Black creators make up less than 5 percent of footwear design. The two figures measure different populations and shouldn’t be averaged together, but they point the same direction — a stark gap next to the roughly 14 percent of the US population that is Black.
Footwear brands have built entire business lines on Black athletes, Black musicians and Black consumer culture. Signature shoes ride on Black sporting achievement. Campaigns borrow language and imagery from Black communities. Sneaker demand frequently builds inside Black cultural networks long before a shoe goes mainstream.
The people deciding how those shoes actually get made have stayed far less diverse than the market buying them.
A designer’s fingerprints are on a product months before a campaign ever runs — the shape, the materials, who the shoe fits, whose body it was designed around. Getting more Black designers into that room is real progress. But once the design is made under an employment contract, the company typically owns it, and the commercial rights stay there. That’s a reasonable trade for a salary, especially for someone early in a career — which is exactly why headcount can’t be the whole story.
Designer Brands Didn’t Pretend Otherwise
Designer Brands, DSW’s parent company, put in a separate $2 million in February 2022—scholarships, internships, and support for JEMS by Pensole, a programme built to develop Black leaders in footwear.
We see the footwear industry lacking effective representation by people of color, specifically Blacks. — Bill Jordan
Designer Brands needed a workforce that looked more like its customers. Pensole Lewis needed capital and a pipeline into jobs. Neither side dressed it up as anything else.
What’s missing is the follow-through. Designer Brands announced the dollar figure and the intent; it hasn’t published how many participants landed paid roles, what they were paid, or how many stayed. That’s a gap across most corporate design programmes — companies report scholarships awarded and workshops held, which measures participation, not who ended up with real authority over a product or a seat at the table where budgets get decided.
Pensole Lewis is positioned to set a better standard here: an annual, anonymized graduate report tracking placement, pay and promotion, plus a separate accounting of any patents, licenses or creator payments tied to sponsored projects. That data would help the college too — it’s how you find out which partnerships are actually working and which ones aren’t.
The Best Design a Student Makes Might Never Show Up in a Portfolio
A young designer can help build a shoe that sells in forty countries and never see another dollar from it once the paycheck clears. Assigning employee-created IP to the employer is standard across design-led industries — nothing unusual about that arrangement, just worth naming.
That doesn’t make the job worthless. A few years at a major company teaches things — manufacturing systems, industry contacts — that are hard to get any other way, and can become the foundation for a studio or a brand of one’s own down the line.
Ownership takes a different kind of runway: money for samples, legal support, factories that will actually take a small order, and a way to reach customers once the product exists. Production mistakes eat capital fast, and retail shelf space can stay closed even to strong work.
Pensole Lewis already teaches brand and product marketing, which gets students partway there. Its corporate relationships could go further — commissioning graduate-run studios, licensing student designs instead of just hiring the designer, buying from alumni-founded companies. The contract terms would matter as much as the gesture: a sponsored project that hands over every right leaves the student with a job and a portfolio credit; a royalty clause lets them keep a stake in what they made.
Eventually, the College Faces Its Own Version of This Question
The Gilbert grant runs five years. After that, Pensole Lewis has to cover faculty, scholarships, facilities and student services without losing control over where the school is headed.
Its wide roster of corporate partners helps — footwear, apparel, furniture, retail and tech companies all have a stake, so no single sponsor can steer too much. But leaning on annual corporate giving still leaves a college exposed to whichever way those companies’ budgets swing in a given year.
The more durable fix sits on the college’s own balance sheet: an endowment that outlasts any one executive’s tenure, equipment the school owns outright, licensing revenue from designs or research developed on campus. A venture fund for graduate-founded companies would be the riskiest move and the most interesting one — it would give Pensole Lewis a direct stake in its own alumni’s success, something a standard placement pipeline never provides.
What comes next will show up in unglamorous paperwork — offer letters, promotion notices, patent filings, licensing deals, new business registrations. That paper trail will eventually answer the real question: whether the $10 million built a bigger Black workforce for existing brands, or gave Black designers, and their college, an actual claim on what they make.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Gilbert Family Foundation commit $10 million to Pensole Lewis? The foundation announced the five-year commitment in 2021, as D’Wayne Edwards worked to reopen the former Lewis College of Business. Coverage in 2026 resurfaced the figure without always making its original date clear.
Did Target contribute the entire $10 million? No. The $10 million came from the Gilbert Family Foundation. Target joined as a separate founding partner through its Racial Equity Action and Change strategy. Designer Brands later made its own, distinct $2 million investment.
Why do major footwear companies work with Pensole Lewis? The college trains students in product design, colour and materials, and marketing — skills footwear and apparel companies need directly. It also gives them access to Black candidates in a field where available estimates put Black representation under 5 percent.
Who owns a product a Pensole Lewis graduate designs? It depends on the contract. Employers typically own IP created by employees on the job; student competitions, commissioned projects and licensing programmes can set different terms. Designers should check ownership, royalty, patent-credit and future-use provisions before signing anything away.
What would actually show whether this investment is working? Graduate salaries, promotion rates and industry tenure would say more than workshop attendance. Patent credits, royalty deals and alumni-founded companies would show whether graduates are building ownership, not just employment. And the college’s own finances after the five-year grant runs out will say a lot about how much independence the money actually bought.
