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HAB students participated in the Young Enterprise Competition which provides a platform for budding entrepreneurs to develop, adapt and improve on an existing product.

The journey involves setting up a registered company (with a bank account), bi-monthly meetings with a business mentor to provide them with information on how to run a business in real life, then actually creating a product and selling it to the general public.

Our girls created a business plan to produce their own homemade sustainable candles which contain soy wax rather than paraffin. This involved working as a team in their own special roles, such as CEO (Chief Executive Officer, Thien) CFO (Chief Financial Officer, XueJun), Marketing Director (Racheal), Operations Manager (Linh), Human Resources Manager (Nour), Deputy Director (Basma), Sustainability Director (Aisha) and Sales manager (Hafsa).

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“A career in business”

“I got involved because I want a future career in business,” says Nour. “I now understand that the processes are not as easy as I first assumed because the workload was much bigger with all the various aspects of production.”

“I got the role of Finance Officer because it furthers my knowledge in Maths and puts my skills into a real-life context,” said XueJun.

The students researched all the items needed to make and sell their products at a profit. They made sure products were ethically sourced and added aesthetic touches, such as beautiful golden bags to appeal to gift buyers. The production process involved the girls staying after school for over a week to make roughly 100 candles scented in lovely fragrances such as Rose Garden, Sandalwood, Cotton Fresh, Coconut, Chocolate and Vanilla - selling at £2 (small), £4 (medium) and £5 (large).

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At the Young Enterprise Trade Fair hosted at Spitalfields Market in East London, 45 schools were each there selling their unique ideas and products to the general public. Jackie Fast from the Apprentice was a judge and spoke to students about their ideas.

HAB students were very organised and hard-working throughout the day. Their stall was immaculate, and their customer services skills improved throughout the day as their confidence of selling to the public became greater. The girls showed great initiative by making sales through written personalised messages and extra sales by walking around with a tray of candles and approaching customers with ‘hard sell’ techniques.

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“I am usually shy but working on the stall helped me develop communication skills in just a day because I really wanted us to succeed,” said Thien.

The event was a huge success and the students sold all their candles. They worked very hard and dealt with the day’s events professionally and calmly.

For more photos click here.

We are very proud of our Young Enterprise students for their excellence and outstanding performance. Their candles are currently being sold across school all year round through Mrs Cole in T5B.

Please follow their journey by following them at @inflamescandles on Twitter and Instagram.