Digital Media Major Rose Ngatchou’s Clothing Label Aims to Uplift
03/01/2025
By Ed Brennen
Sometimes you have to restart your computer.
For senior digital media major Rose Ngatchou, a self-described “tech enthusiast” with passions for poetry and acting, that meant taking a semester off during a difficult sophomore year. During her reboot, she started her own poetry-inspired clothing label, Where Flowers Bloom.
“When I was growing up, all the sweatshirts and T-shirts that I saw were really tacky. There were just too many graphics and weird sayings like ‘Rainbow Superpower,’” the Washington, D.C., native says. “I wanted this brand to inspire people in a more poetic and creative way, and also to be super-minimalistic.”
Ngatchou began designing hats, tote bags and hoodie sweatshirts with sayings like “Never lose sight of your dreams” and “Faith: Navigating with principles of the unseen in a seeing world.” She sells the items on Etsy and TikTok Shop (and soon Shopify) and has orders printed on demand by a manufacturer. “One of the biggest things I’ve learned from my journey is to just start,” she says. “I didn’t have the capital to buy 500 pieces of product from a manufacturer, so print on demand has helped at least get the brand out there.”
During her reboot, Ngatchou also started getting into NFTs, or nonfungible tokens—a unique digital asset, stored on a digital ledger of cryptocurrency transactions called a blockchain, that represents ownership of a specific item such as art or music. She created and sold a spoken-word poetry NFT and is creating a second one for her senior capstone project.
“There’s so much creativity that goes into tech,” says Ngatchou, who plans to work in the tech industry while taking her clothing line as far as she can. “Everything feeds off each other.”
If she could, Ngatchou would live in sweatshirts and sweatpants. But she knows there’s a time for corporate attire, such as during her technical applications and development analyst internship with Accenture last summer.
“I do love classic, timeless pieces,” she says. “Just simple.”