Member Article

Cordial Gift for Hult Students from Successful Entrepreneur

A team of undergraduate students from Hult International Business School were recently gifted a piece of state-of-the-art juicing equipment to help their on campus business start-up. Not even some of the major juice bars/retail outlets have these juicers in their stores!

A chance meeting by faculty marketing Professor Daniel Vidal and Jim Livingstone (founder of Juico) at a trade show resulted in the generous donation to our students, who founded their business Storange on our Aldgate East campus.

Storange is based on the business model of providing students with healthy options; founded by undergraduate student Sebastien Ferre from Venezuela,

Laura Jaramillo and Juan Herrera, both year four students, accepted the gift on behalf of the founder.

Jim and his colleague Scott McArthur an accredited juice therapist (who learnt under the ‘juice master’ Jason Vale), spoke to the students about how to succeed in the industry, sharing his experiences and telling them:

“Never give up on your dreams, always be honest and work with quality equipment and produce.

I started from very humble beginnings and my advice would be to aim high and network – it’s great to be able to give something back in some small way by means of this gift and I wish them every success“.

The students were overwhelmed with the juicer and said:

“We can’t thank Jim enough for this gift it’s a great kick start to help us as we are self-funding at the moment, and looking to grow our venture across the other Hult campuses in Dubai and San Francisco as well as Boston and Shanghai.

We’d like to thank Hult for their support in helping us to get off of the ground, it’s been great to be able to discuss business ideas with someone who has been there and started and is now running his own successful business. We even Skyped in the other members of the team from their rotation campuses!“

Jim then gave a master class to Digital Tools for Advanced Marketing students, detailing his business model and routes to market – offering advice on starting up from scratch as well as becoming a successful business entrepreneur. He explained how the new generation of juicers are ‘slow juicers’, with new technology to retain all of the vitamins and nutrients and not just pulverizing the fruit as other models do.

The students were on form and asking tricky questions about branding, sourcing equipment, pricing strategy, marketing, product differentiation and more.

Student Angelique Lin enjoyed the master class session and said:

“It was great to hear first-hand how Jim and Scott positioned their business; he spoke about sourcing equipment, marketing and brand positioning, price elasticity and how the market works.

It’s great that Hult have connections with entrepreneurs that can share their experiences with us, it’s all about the real world practical experience as well as academic study that will help us to succeed in the job market“.

This is another great example of how Hult provide experiential learning, helping students to have real work experience during their studies; ensuring students are job ready when they graduate.

Hult really does bring the study of business to life.

Jim and Scott will be back on campus later this week to give students free copies of ‘juice master’ Jason Vale’s DVD and free samples of their products!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Victoria Robinson .