L'Oréal Brandstorm 2021

16:35, May 22, 2021

GSEM UrFU students made it to the Russian final of the case championship

L'Oréal Brandstorm is a world-class case championship. This year, the task of the teams was to rethink beauty shopping through the prism of entertainment and develop a project that would transform ordinary shopping into a beaty entertainment.

Vyacheslav Strievsky and Mikhail Boltychev, students of the programme "International and Corporate Management" of GSEM UrFU, shared with us their impressions of participating in the championship.

Mikhail Boltachev: "I started to feel that I didn't have enough work in the team. I wrote to Slava and Sasha and suggested several possible projects. We have already worked on several projects and received maximum points on each one. It's cool that they agreed to work together again. I think that as a result, we have reached a new level of our professional development.

The championship seemed to me something "unreal", I had experience in the Fashion industry, but I did not know anything about the Beauty industry. But we found the main prize-a trip to Paris-a worthy motivation to participate.

The first and most important thing that you gain in the course of such projects is teamwork. And it's not nearly as idealized as it is in books about teamwork. In addition, you gain search & reserach skills at very high speeds. You learn to organize your time and it is impossible without discipline (or perhaps ...). But "hard" skills depend on the championship. In Brandstorm 2021, we worked on many new strategic frameworks that are used in real life.

The main thing is not to limit your imagination and your capabilities. To reach the final you do not need to be "above average", you only need to register and go in small steps to the goal. Therefore, do not be afraid to take part in various initiatives: in the worst case, you will get experience.

The championship itself was held at a high level, but we did not understand the rules and read them only a week before the final. From all this, we concluded that we beat the teams of the teams of Moscow State University, HSE and other top universities on the way to the final only because we acted solely within the framework of our imagination.

During preparation, we regularly met at 13:00 at Simple Coffee on Gogol Street (just not far from the building of the Business School, so that later we could go to lectures) and once I came alone and sat for an hour, it turned out that everyone forgot about the meeting .. But then the guys rehabilitated themselves and used all their free time until the end of the day to work on a solution.

I would like to say a special thank you to Daria Zubakina and Nikita Shvalev for their support throughout the championship. Their involvement in the process and their willingness to help was a special motivating factor for us."

Vyacheslav Strievsky: "I recently took part in the case championship called L'Oreal Brandstorm 2021. I decided to participate quite by accident, at the invitation of our classmate Mikhail Boltachev. Starting from the second year, we carry out projects with this team, and therefore the choice fell on this composition. We were interested in the experience of case-championships, because in the future they can be useful in our work. At such events, participants can acquire quick thinking skills in solving problems of various types and complexity, improve teamwork and the possibility of employment in the company. The organization was great, and the only thing you could find fault with was the notification service”