Retail students rise to Start-Up challenge

An Apprentice-style challenge which saw students from City College Norwich getting out of the classroom and selling men’s fashion wear to the city’s shoppers has been a big hit with students.

The 21 BTEC Business with Retail students were given just one week in which to choose a location from sites kindly permitted within Norwich’s Chapelfield shopping centre, and within the College, to select their stock, decide on their pricing and sales strategy, work out a marketing plan and sell their stock over three days of trading.

In true Apprentice style, the students’ performance was monitored every step of the way before they were summoned back to the College’s new StartUp Lounge to evaluate their results and reflect on the key decisions on which a profitable outcome depended.

The overall winners of the StartUp Challenge were the Delta Squad team, whose members were Davy Crowe-Wilde, Ashley Franklin, Joshua Petch and Shaun Woods.

The StartUp Challenge wasn’t just about the winners though: all of the students who took part gained a huge amount from the experience. Through the process of setting up their pop-up shops, the students learned that retailing is more than just turning up and standing on a shop floor.

The students gained practical insights into buying, pricing, visual merchandising, selling, customer services, logistics and operations. They quickly recognised the importance of location strategy and about knowing your customers.

Sue Dougal, Head of the RETAIL skills academy was impressed with the way the teams negotiated with each other for the various locations, commenting “Alan Sugar would have been proud of them!”.

The total turnover was almost £550 and one team raised an additional £35 which will be donated to the charity Scope. The students had an invaluable learning experience, sold stock on behalf of ego and supported some great causes (with ego's profits being used to train people to become great retailers and also supporting the College's Student New Opportunities Fund).

The retail enterprise StartUp Challenge was organised by the RETAIL skills academy at the College and was supported by WorldSkills London 2011, the European Social Fund, and stock was sold on behalf of ego, the academy’s buy and sell fashion boutique located in Chapelfield.

This was the first of many collaborations between the academy and the college’s StartUp Lounge which will launch in February.

Dick Palmer, Principal, City College Norwich, said: “The retail enterprise StartUp Challenge has shown that students respond really positively to this type of entrepreneurial challenge in which they are given responsibility for making their own decisions and then having to make these work in practice. Through our new StartUp Lounge we are looking forward to running lots more challenges like this for students across all of our curriculum areas.”

Business with Retail student Joshua Petch, 17, from the winning Delta Squad team, said: "It was a really good experience, I really enjoyed it. Our location was quite difficult and we were the fourth team to pick our stock, but I think our opening hours were good, we got the peak times. I learned a lot about how to approach customers and how to talk to them."  

Image shows the winning Delta Squad team (L-R) Joshua Petch, Shaun Woods, Ashley Franklin and Davy Crowe-Wilde being presented with their certificates by Sue Dougal, Head of the RETAIL skills academy.