ENTREPRENEURIAL sixth-formers at North Bromsgrove High School won a Worcestershire Marketing Award .
The accolade came during a competition aimed at empowering young people to discover, develop and celebrate their skills and potential and inspire the next generation of business people.
The competition has been running at North for a number of years and has produced a variety of successful companies and reaped a number of awards.
The team won the ‘best social marketing’ accolade in North Worcestershire, even with the pandemic and lockdown bringing the year’s competition to a swift end.
The contest involves the students working as a team to set up their own business before developing and accessing ideas for a successful product, managing the sourcing of the raw materials for their creations, making the product and selling the finished articles to the public.
Students also need to engage in all aspects of business from product research and marketing to finances as they run their enterprise as any actual business would do.
A school spokesperson said: “This gives those taking part a real insight into working for and running a business and enables them to see how their theory, no matter what courses they are taking, could be applied into real life scenarios.”
This year the students faced an even greater challenge to succeed in this competition, with Covid hampering the normal participation in the competition. Nevertheless, the year 12 group showed great determination and perseverance and developed the idea for their product ‘Wild Bee Wax Candles’.
Students sourced locally produced bees’ wax, wood wick candles, and successfully managed to integrate environmentally friendly aspects into their business model through receiving donations of glass jars destined for recycling.
They upcycled them into a great looking and smelling candle, available in a variety of fragrances.
Their product was unique and their marketing technique of using the term ‘flavours’ instead of scents made people ask more questions about their product leading to more purchases – although the young bosses admit tasting candles is not recommended.
The group has recently taken an additional 68 orders as part of a one-day pop-up shop within school and others coming through their national online sales platform.
