Wild Bee Wax is the name and candles are the game!

Here at North Bromsgrove High School our Year 12 Sixth Formers have been busy participating in all kinds of extra-curricular activities over the last year, covid compliant obviously.

One of these being the Young Enterprise Challenge. This is a competition to empower young people to discover, develop and celebrate their skills and potential and inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. The competition has been running at North for a number of years and we have had a variety of successful companies and received a number of awards, last year being the ‘best social marketing’ award North Worcestershire even with the pandemic and lockdown effecting the swift end to the competition that year.

The competition involves the students working as a team to set up their own business, developing and accessing ideas for a successful product, managing the sourcing of the raw materials for the product, creating or making of the product and eventually selling that product in a variety of ways to the public. Students also need to engage in all aspects of business from product research, marketing to finances and run their enterprise as any actual business would do.

This gives those taking part a real insight into working for and running a business and enables them to see how their courses theory, no matter what courses they are taking, could be applied into real life scenarios.

This year the students have faced an even greater challenge to succeed in this competition, with COVID hampering the normal participation in the competition. Nevertheless, the group have showed great determination and perseverance and developed the idea for their product, Wild Bee Wax Candles.

Students have sourced locally produced bee’s wax, wood wick candles, and successfully managed to integrate environmentally friendly aspects into their business model through receiving donations of glass jars that were destined for recycling and upcycled them into a great looking and smelling candle that are available in a variety of fragrances. Their product is unique and their marketing technique of using the term flavours instead of scents makes people ask more questions about their product leading to purchases. (Tasting candles is not recommended!)

There are many ways for students to achieve within the competition, from the best marketing, winners of the best group presentation/interview given to a professional panel of business judges, to best product, most personal growth, highest performing business and many more.

The group have recently taken an additional 68 orders as part of a one-day pop-up shop within school and have many orders coming through their national online sales platform.

(L>R Team Wild Bee Wax Oliver C, Oliver G, Leo CC, Ben H, Adam H, Alex H, Dylan B)

A huge congratulations to the group for their successes so far and good luck in the upcoming Area Finals along with the final company reports and hoping you reach the Regional Finals!

#Go Team North!