From Intern to Agency Founder: How Following Curiosity Led to a Career in Fashion and Social Media

WORDS BY EXPERT EDUCATOR, ASH DAVIDSON

I certainly did not grow up dreaming of being a social media girlie (I actually classify myself as anything but that). Not to mention when I was in high school, Instagram didn’t even exist yet. All I really knew was that I loved fashion, beauty, and storytelling - and that’s pretty much how my career started to take shape.

Like everyone in this industry, I started at the bottom. I was on the train from Western Sydney every day to uni or college, countless unpaid internships, running around Sydney with garment bags and beauty samples for magazines like ELLE, and GQ. Not glamorous, but educational to say the least.

My first real role was at a creative agency when I made the move to Melbourne at 21, and it was sink or swim. The pace was relentless, the expectations were sky high, and I had to learn real fast. This was something of a trial by fire but it did give me my grit, which luckily is a learned skill.

When I later moved into MECCA’s head office as a Social Media Specialist, it was sink-or-swim all over again, only two-fold. The scale, the speed, the sheer amount of moving parts and thankless long hours - it demanded thick skin and problem-solving on the fly (also essential skills for this industry). Those years were tough as hell but they did build the resilience I now rely on every single day.

From there, I ended up at Melbourne-born brand frank body, where I worked my way deeper into social media with filming, editing, strategising, and generally trying to keep up with the algorithm’s mood swings. And after almost a decade of working across beauty and fashion, I did something I swore I’d never do: I kind of accidentally started an agency.

At the time, I was freelancing and had to make the call to keep doing the solo thing, or build something bigger. What tipped it for me was the idea of mentoring a team and creating a space where people actually wanted to come to work every day. It sounds cliche but to simply just work hard and have fun while doing it is everything to me.

Mentoring turned out to be something that was very important to me, and that’s carried through into teaching. For me, it’s about preparing students in a way that’s real, relatable, and actually useful for the industry you’re about to step into. My semi-useless journalism degree definitely didn’t do that for me, so I know in retrospect how much this matters.

This is also why NFC is the perfect fit for me as a teacher, because the whole approach here is built around the same idea: giving students skills that translate to the real world, with real industry knowledge, not just ticking boxes for a piece of paper.

Lastly and somewhat most importantly, none of my career happened because I was networking in a rigid, business-card-swapping-kinda-way. Every opportunity I’ve had has come from wanting to build genuine connections with people I actually liked and respected. And my present-day client portfolio reflects that - if the vibe is right, the work usually is too.

Now, alongside running Pash Social where we work with the biggest and most innovative global brands like Dyson, Laneige, Sephora and Ultra Violette, I get to bring the many, many lessons I've learnt along the way into the classroom. Whether it’s how to tackle a campaign when an influencer goes rogue, or how to manage small business cash flow...

I never planned this particular career path, I just followed the opportunities that felt right at the time, worked with people I genuinely connected with, and kept evolving as the industry did. And honestly that's my broken-record advice for students too: Don’t over-engineer the plan, stay curious, stay open, and keep your work (and your relationships) as real as you can. Then the rest is all figureoutable.

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