“Taming of the Shoe”: Examining the Effects of Exchange Rates on Steve Madden’s Cashflow
In the fall of my junior year, I decided to take Financial Accounting (BUS 211) as an elective. What a challenging course it was! Accounting has a totally different language of debits and credits and all sorts of adjusting entries. I have generally shied away from math, but I embraced Financial Accounting as an essential skill builder, and I am so glad I did. The BUS 211 course at Agnes Scott gives students an introduction to the principles of accounting theory and provides us with the opportunity to apply these principles in business and government to record business transactions and journal entries.
“Taming of the Shoe” is one of the projects I completed in this class to connect accounting theory to real businesses. We were tasked with writing a business article on a publicly traded company, analyzing one element within its 10-K Financial Statements that was of interest of us and connect it back to the material of the course. While accounting jargon is a little inevitable in an analysis like this, our projects were meant to be consumed by a wide audience, so the language should be understood by people outside of our field.
I selected Steve Madden, Ltd., an American fashion accessory company with a global reach, as my publicly traded company to examine. This project was a wonderful learning experience for me. Accounting didn’t necessarily have content that pulled at my intellectual interests in a fervent manner, but I enjoyed finding notable ideas to analyze in a field that I hadn’t frequented before. While I did the work to complete the assignment, I found much value in having autonomy over my learning through this assignment, pushing myself to make connections that weren’t discussed fully in our class sessions.
Featured Image: “Woman At Shoe Store” by Alexandra Maria is licensed under CC0.
