Hooch Grad Goes From SCAD To Sportswear Design Cooperative

JOHNS CREEK, GA – Johns Creek’s Hope Kemp-Hanson, 20, who is in her junior year of fashion design at Savannah College of Art and Design, was recently selected for a design cooperative at New Balance.

Kemp-Hanson was among 30 designers chosen from a global search for the hands-on three-week class sponsored by Pensole at the New Balance headquarters in Boston.

A 2016 Chattahoochee High School graduate and girls varsity soccer captain, Kemp-Hanson created a charity, Athletes that Care, before heading to SCAD’s Savannah campus, where she played soccer for the Lady Bees. After she was sidelined by a knee injury, she focused on design, a field in which she had her first internship at 14. Though her initial interest was haute couture, for which she debuted a formal dress line as a high school senior, Kemp-Hanson’s study as a SCAD athlete soon took a sportier turn.

That shift ­– to designing sportswear using smart textiles with a concentration on sustainability – resulted in an invitation to the global headquarters of Adidas in Herzogenaurach, Germany, this past summer. Soon after, Kemp-Hanson became one of five functional apparel designers chosen from around the world for the Pensole Fall 2018 Design Intensive in Portland, Oregon. She was awarded the Two-Ten Scholarship to attend the highly competitive program founded by D’wayne Edwards, the former Jordan Design Director at Nike.

During the three-month program, she worked with a small team of students for Xenith to create their first line of protective gear for women’s soccer. Kemp-Hanson’s individual project within the collection was building a biomechanical compression suit that uses proprioception to allow the body to subconsciously protect itself from ACL injury.