When we first got together to prepare our proposal for the L’Oréal Brandstorm contest, we never thought we would reach to the UK&I finals. We started our journey by deciding the subject we wanted to focus on and as all three of us are passionate about Tech we agreed on proceeding with the Tech Trek (there was a sustainability and diversity and inclusion trek). We, also, came up with the name FashionTech1.0 to represent us.
We had a solid idea that all three of us believed in, however, we knew that the competition would be fierce. We combined our forces and different backgrounds, and through extensive brainstorming sessions we created our presentation. In addition, we spent a lot of time doing our due diligence and research on the subject, whilst being well informed on the background, technology, and updates of the idea behind our proposal. Therefore, we were quite confident that we had the necessary knowledge and exposure to the subject matter.
A couple of months later we received an email that our proposal had passed to the semi-finals of UK&I. We were really excited about the news and outcome of our efforts. Once we progressed to the finals, we received a separate number of tasks we needed to complete ahead of the final presentation day. By that time, we were all immersed in our MBA Global Consulting projects (GCP), hence, it required a lot of effort to co-ordinate and balance this additional work along with our consulting project and MBA essay deadlines.
We strived to distribute the parts of the project amongst ourselves and give as much flexibility as possible to the members of the team to work on them at a convenient time within their day. Moreover, we had to contact our L’Oréal assigned mentor to review our work and advise us on changes we could make to communicate more succinctly our message and findings.
The day of the presentation came, and we had already spent hours practicing our respective parts. The experience was incredible as, despite being online, we got to meet the other candidates and the judges. Although, we didn’t win the competition we learnt a great deal from the experience, and we got exposure to a great company with a very attractive culture. We developed our team working skills and we definitely got a great story to narrate in future interactions.