Young Entrepreneurs in BE6

Our BE6 students worked together as a team during the second semester on a business project to raise money for a final school year trip to Europapark. To achieve their aim, they started their very own company making beautiful jewellery to sell both in person and online, with the profits all going towards their Europapark fund! They called themselves IMZjewelry which is their very own special spelling of jewellery! This simplification of the spelling was part of the branding.

There were fifteen students in the project team, and they organised themselves as a real-life company with two CEO’s and three 3 departments, Marketing, Finance and Production. Each department had its own team leader and the company was successful in obtaining starting capital of CHF150 from YES (Young Enterprise Switzerland). They ran their business during handicraft classes, with a range of skills deployed from woodwork to leadership. The products included keychains, necklaces, rings and personalised amulets.

The company set up its own web site and social media channels during the course of the project. Unfortunately, the website is no longer available with the students going their separate ways at the end of the school year, but who knows what the future holds for these ambitious young entrepreneurs and their jewellery brand. The project was organised and supervised by BE Teacher Ms Büscherfeld.

A final word from CEO Philipp:

“We chose this topic because we wanted to see how it is in a real-life business. Right now, we don’t want to do anything else with the money other than going to Europapark. One of the main highlights was to grow as a class and have fun. Also, we learned different things: working with tools in the WerkStadt, or how much it takes to talk to people in marketing, and to calculate different numbers. Although those are the teams, it also takes a lot from the CEOs to have a general knowledge of what the individual groups are doing.”