Team Shield & Regeneration comprising University of Nottingham Malaysia (UNM) students Ler Jie Sze (Finance Accounting & Management), Christopher Khoo Jinn Wei (Mechanical Engineering) and Cheong Zhao Shen (Mechanical Engineering) emerged as the national champions in the 2021 L’Oreal Brandstorm Malaysia competition during the National Finals, which was held virtually on 19 April 2021.
Another group of UNM students - Team Gamine comprising Poa Yee Shuang (Finance, Accounting & Management), Jacyln Hu Xin Yiu (Economics) and Lua Yun Xin (Economics and International Economics) clinched the runner-up position.
L’Oreal Brandstorm is an annual international innovation competition that takes place in over 60 countries and provides a platform to enhance students’ entrepreneurial and creativity skills, in addition to offering participants the opportunity to come up with innovations for the beauty industry.
The business case to be solved differs each year and participants in the 2021 edition were challenged to ‘invent the beauty shopping experience through entertainment’.
“When we first started the competition, we went in not expecting to make it to where we did. Every single round was challenging, but each time, our idea got better and more solid thanks to the mentors that guided us along the way,†said Zhao Shen from Team Shield & Regeneration.
He added that their idea was to push skincare for males through gaming. As gaming is a booming industry, they believed that skincare could grow alongside it.
Although the idea was very different from conventional strategies in skincare marketing, they believed that the uniqueness and innovation involved in their idea would be the differentiating factor and they planned to use that to their advantage.
“The experience with L'Oréal Brandstorm 2021 has been an exciting and fulfilling one. We would strongly recommend anyone that is considering participating in this competition to just go for it! There's truly no limit to the soft and critical skills that can be picked up along the way, and we are truly honoured to be a part of this,†he added.
“We’re incredibly proud of both teams for their achievements at the L’Oreal Brandstorm Malaysia competition. It’s good to see that our students are putting their best foot forward even in these difficult times,†said Professor Sam Kingman, Interim Provost of UNM.
Team Shield & Regeneration will represent Malaysia in the Worldwide Finals which is scheduled to take place at the end of June 2021.
(Article image caption: UNM students emerged as the National Champions (Team Shield & Regeneration, [left]) and First Runner-Up (Team Gamine, [right]) at the 2021 L'Oreal Brandstorm Malaysia competition.)
(Thumbnail image caption: Team Shield & Regeneration emerged as the National Champions in the 2021 L’Oreal Brandstorm Malaysia competition)
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