How would you do pitching a product to Kirsten Wise, Katie Nimon and Kim Ellison?
Arguably not as well as Central Hawke’s Bay College students Neeve Smith, Greta Minehan and Maddie Ewen did.
The trio are part of this region’s Young Enterprise Scheme (YES), developing a powdered sunscreen company they’ve called Retouch & Co. Part makeup, part sunscreen, it’s about to go on sale in August, having survived the YES Dragons’ Den experience where they pitched to the Napier Mayor, Napier MP and a highly-credentialed advertising and marketing executive respectively.
“They were amazing. They blew them away,” business development coordinator for the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce Fran Arlidge said. “They were the highest scoring group on that day and absolutely crushed it, so it goes to show that these kids mean business and can get up in front of people like that and not be scared.’’
It’s a long way from selling chicken nuggets and chips, which Smith, Minehan and Ewen were doing a year ago.
This latest venture was born of sunburn Ewen suffered at a summer festival, after not wanting smear sunscreen over her makeup.
It’s been an exhaustive process getting Retouch & Co to this point, involving cosmetic chemists, suppliers, packagers, you name it. The trio has done it all off their own bat, working off seed money they secured from the Chamber of Commerce – on the strength of a pitch which scored 94 points out of a possible 100 – to the stage where they’ll be among 80 YES groups selling their wares at the Hawke’s Bay Farmers’ Market on August 18.
The target market for Retouch & Co is 16 to 24-year-olds, but it’s a product everyone can use. “It can go up to people in their 50s and even men. Like, my dad’s bald and when he puts sunscreen on his head it makes it greasy,’’ Ewen said.
The team from RoadReady NZ won’t have a fully-developed App to show people at the farmers’ market.
Sacred Heart College students Sneha Jenson and Chahat Dhami are among a group who realised many of their peers weren’t progressing from learner to restricted driver’s licences.
The cost of driving instructors was an obvious impediment, so they developed an App, containing an infinite number of routes across Hawke’s Bay that contain the 10 assessable tasks required to pass the practical portion of the restricted test.
It’s all about giving parents the tools to get their child accustomed to being out on the road, safe in the knowledge they’re following the correct testing protocols.
“But it costs $250,000 to get an App developed,’ Jenson said.
That’s where the YES, which Arlidge oversees for the Chamber of Commerce, came in.
RoadReadyNZ, whose marketing slogan is ‘Be Ready for the Road with RoadReadyNZ’, wrote to New Zealand universities hoping software engineering students would develop the App for free. Victoria University answered in the affirmative and RoadReadyNZ takes possession of the App any day now.
“We couldn’t have done it without Young Enterprise. If we weren’t a Young Enterprise business, we’d just be some 16-year-olds,’’ said Jenson.
Arlidge is a graduate of the YES programme herself and can’t believe how the initiative has grown in Hawke’s Bay. Students are able to take part in the scheme, and earn NCEA credits, as part of their business studies courses. Even students at schools where it isn’t part of the curriculum, with Arlidge citing Lindisfarne College and Napier Boys’ High School as examples, can participate.
It’s all about experiencing the practical, rather than learning to regurgitate the theory.
“These skills that they learn at this age can be used again and again. They don’t have to go to university and do a business degree to be an entrepreneur,’’ said Arlidge. “I did Young Enterprise and it definitely gave me the foundation of understanding business from an on-the-ground perspective, as opposed to taking eight papers at uni on entrepreneurship. Hawke’s Bay this year is booming in the sense that we have so many students participating.’’
The relationship with the farmers’ market is critical to the art of teaching students to sell.
Last year about 60 groups showed their wares at the market and Arlidge puts the growth down to things such as TikTok, where young people see peers living the entrepreneurial dream.
All up 500 Hawke’s Bay students are part of the YES programme this year. “If they don’t have a product they can do pre-orders, they can do surveys, they can create a database,’’ Arlidge said of the farmers’ market experience. “It’s just a good opportunity for them to get in front of people that aren’t their immediate circle or their schools.’’
The YES participants will also be at the Napier Urban Farmers’ Market on August 24.
Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air
