What an incredibly proud moment it is for one of our Young Enterprise teams, Kioko, as they win the national Brand4Success competition.
Every year, OHS’s budding entrepreneurs take part in the Young Enterprise Programme, a nationwide competition that allows 15 to 19 year olds to set up and run a student company.
Kioko is an eco-friendly business that transforms waste coconut shells into unique and beautiful hand-designed housewares. Sustainability and design are key to Kioko’s beliefs, and the team has worked incredibly hard to reduce their carbon footprint every step of the way, from packaging to shipping. They are even planning on incorporating the transfer of products between designers and packagers into their daily exercise, thus reducing their carbon emissions!
Managing Directors Shreya (S1) and Lizzie (S5) shared some thoughts with us:
How do you feel winning the competition?
We are so pleased to have won the Brand4Success competition, and are particularly proud of our incredible design and marketing team who submitted our entry. By reaching out in this way, we feel that we can effectively achieve our long-term goals of making Kioko a widely-known company.
What will you do with the prize money?
We hope to invest it in our new products and latest range. Our design team recently presented a beautiful Spring Collection, which can be seen on our social media pages. We hope to have three different collections, which incorporate our core designs.
What are the next steps for the team?
Our immediate first step is deciding which company we will be buying the coconut bowls from. We have been discussing this during our virtual meetings, which certainly have been a challenge for us, as we’re a fairly large team of 15 students! Despite this, we hope to continue selling our products with a new plan in place for lockdown. Our future plans mainly focus on working to sell and deliver our products successfully during this time. Further down the line, we want to look into selling outside of the UK and into Europe which we feel will be a great, but achievable, challenge post-Brexit.
Recently, the team was featured in various Oxfordshire-based news websites, including the Oxford Mail. They were delighted about this as it allows them to reach out to the local community. They will also be interviewed live on BBC Radio Oxford on 18th January – watch this space for more details coming soon!
Congratulations on this excellent achievement, Kioko! We very much look forward to seeing your new products and future business plans.
You can check out Kioko’s products by visiting their Instagram and Twitter pages.