On Saturday the 9th of March, the Young Enterprise Company Connect Programme hosted a trade fair for schools in the area; one of Lady Eleanor Holles’ Young Enterprise teams, Eclipse, took on the fair to showcase our product and sell to the wider public. The Trade Fair, hosted at Eden Walk Shopping centre in Kingston, was a great experience for our team, and we received considerable interest and many purchases of our card game ‘Culturosity’.

The Young Enterprise programme involves a group of school students collaborating to set up and run a company, under the guidance of a representative and business adviser. Our journey has involved fundraising, developing ideas and partnering with manufacturers to eventually produce our final product: an interactive and engaging card game designed to spread knowledge about different cultures through a competitive and fun medium. The experience has taught us many valuable skills of innovating, organising and working within a large team, and we hoped to portray our dedication to the product whilst selling at the Trade Fair. 

The event was diverse and exciting, and my whole team thoroughly enjoyed interacting with other schools and their products. From candles and card games, to device holders and books, each student company had a unique and creative idea on offer, meaning the day was never boring. A mixture of students, Young Enterprise representatives and members of the public visited all of the stalls, and we enjoyed receiving a range of input on our marketing and product.

Overall, the event was a roaring success for team Eclipse. We truly loved selling our card game, along with authentic homemade recipe cards taken from different cultures within our school’s community. Our highlight of the day was receiving the Best Sales Team Award due to our “enthusiastic and knowledgeable” sales pitch. We also particularly enjoyed quizzing customers using our card game, and entering them onto a leaderboard with a prize at the end. One student member of the team commented that it was a “huge honour to meet the Mayor” and that she would have “loved to attend the event, even outside of Young Enterprise”.