Local Advantage

When local businesses and Fairfield Dolan students connect, the benefit is mutual.

Mairead Kelly ’26 noticed the cute “Fairfield Beach” sweatshirts when she first arrived on campus, but she had no idea where you could buy one. That mystery was solved by a memorable class assignment.

This year, Charles F. Dolan School of Business students in an advertising class taught by adjunct professor Mary Kelly ’02 and in a social media marketing course taught by associate professor of marketing Woocheol Kim, PhD, worked with local merchants to learn real-world skills and put up-to-the-moment advertising and marketing strategies to the test. These vibrant partnerships helped Fairfield community businesses boost awareness and sales while creating meaningful challenges for the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Dr. Kim’s social media marketing students were paired with two restaurants: Romanacci, an Italian restaurant celebrating its first year in town, and Chef’s Table, an established American eatery with a reputation for great soups, sandwiches, and coffee.

Adjunct Professor Kelly’s advertising students were matched up with Team Woofgang & Co., a non-profit that has both a production site that creates custom dog treats, beds, and toys, and a downtown retail store that sells Woofgang & Co. products as well as cards, gifts, and apparel — including those popular “Fairfield Beach” sweatshirts.

When choosing a business partner for her class, “I look at what students are wearing or doing,” said Professor Kelly. Community partnerships typically begin with a classroom visit in which the business owners present their original business plan, current employment, and strategies for building and keeping a strong customer base. They then identify challenges for the students to address with creative solutions.

Working in teams of three or four, students take a deep dive into the businesses — they research theory, study current best practices, and prepare final 12-minute presentations for the owners and their boards.

Caroline Cody ’25, a public relations major from Chicago, said she was “blown away” by Team Woofgang & Co.’s creative brief. “They do amazing work,” she said of the organization, which provides individualized vocational training, lifelong learning, and social opportunities to adults with a wide range of intellectual and developmental disabilities. “They motivated me to come up with ideas and put in the effort — it made the project more meaningful.”

While the students felt Team Woofgang did an exceptional job of sharing its mission with the Fairfield community, several teams recommended ways for the organization to better showcase products at its prime downtown storefront — simple improvements like intentionally putting brighter shades of clothing in the store window, adding a QR code on the glass to entice passersby, and using eye-catching outdoor advertising to draw attention to the store’s sidewalk browsing rack. Others suggested Fairfield University events as a ready-made opportunity for a pop-up shop.

Just up the road, Dr. Kim’s social media marketing students were cooking up ways to boost restaurant sales through businessoriented social media content.

At Romanacci, which has two locations in Westport and one each in Trumbull and Norwalk, Chief Marketing Officer James Ricci was looking for a fresh approach to attracting customers to their new Fairfield restaurant through social media. “The students are very deep in the weeds of social, which is valuable when approaching these platforms from a business perspective,” he said.

Teams of Dr. Kim’s students studied the restaurant and created both paid social advertising and organic content. The student-created posts — about 16 in all — garnered two to three times as many likes and shares as the restaurant’s previous content. One Instagram post earned about 420 interactions, including more than 200 shares, which spelled more orders for Romanacci. “We had an uptick on TikTok,” Ricci said, “and student foot traffic increased. We’re kind of becoming ‘the place’ for them.”

At Chef’s Table, students were also tasked with branding the business and maximizing the benefits of social media. Business management and marketing double-major Julia Paul ’26 said that working on the restaurant’s Instagram content exponentially enhanced her team’s classroom experience by providing “hands-on application of the different facets of social media marketing that we had learned through lectures.”

“I have always said experience is the best teacher,” agreed classmate Tristan DeCrescenzo ’26, a marketing major with a graphic design minor. “Seeing how creative strategy and thoughtful execution can genuinely drive engagement in a real-world setting made the impact of our hard work feel tangible.”

Beyond providing students with realworld experience and offering marketing support to local businesses, business owners and Dolan faculty members were happy to see these community partnerships evolve in new ways. As a result of their successful collaboration in the fall, Romanacci offered two students a semester-long internship in spring 2025. The owners also plan to enlist more help from Fairfield Dolan students when they open their new downtown gelato place, OGGI.

At Team Woofgang, two advertising classmates — Maggie Freeman ’26 and Mairead Kelly ’26 — were hired as regular weekly interns. They worked on fundraising campaigns, wrote video scripts, and recommended new apparel ideas with the male customer in mind, said the non-profit’s co-founder Kelly Maffei.

“They have managed to give us new and fresh perspectives,” Maffei said. “They knocked it out of the park.”

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