Two different instructors with substantial fashion industry experiences worked together in Spring 2014 to re-design the syllabus of the Fashion Art Studio, a required foundation course for fashion merchandising major. The aim was to eliminate projects and class work that were purely art based and did not have a current fashion merchandising industry application while still fulfilling the same course learning goals. A sustainability approach was also thought out for re-purposing the physical outcome of the assignments and having most of them feed into another project or ending into a portfolio page. The purpose of this paper is to present our common strategies and outcomes from the pilot study and share our findings.