Judges crown Sages as LCF Enterprise Challenge 2022 winners
- Written byLondon College of Fashion
- Published date 17 June 2022
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"We are thrilled to have won the Enterprise Challenge this year and we are super excited for our next steps. Being recognised for what we are trying to achieve is a wonderful thing and we are so grateful for everything that London College of Fashion, UAL has given us.” - Alice Simpson and Emily Taylor, Founders of Sages and winners of LCF Enterprise Challenge 2022.
LCF are pleased to announce this year’s winners of its annual Enterprise Challenge; a platform that showcases the creative talents and entrepreneurial mindsets of current London College of Fashion students to the LCF community as well as key members of industry. To celebrate the event, the previous year's winner, Chamiah Dewey was in attendance to give a few words of motivation to the finalists and also took over the LCF official Instagram channel for a behind the scenes look into the event.
The first-place winners of the 2022 Enterprise Challenge Award are duo Alice Simpson, MA Fashion Design Technology (Menswear), and Emily Taylor, MA Fashion Futures, for their pitch on SAGES a company creating natural dyes derived from food waste products. In recognition they will receive funding from the Challenge sponsors Shaftesbury PLC, PR and digital coaching support from Sister London, marketing promotion from Eyes on Talents, mentoring from The Wall Group and one year of a Soho Friends Membership from Soho Works including two feature interviews and a dedicated launch event for their business idea at one of their locations. Simpson and Taylor will also be fast-tracked to the UAL Creative Enterprise Awards Finals later this year. Winners are recognised in the categories of first-place, second-place, third-place and ‘highly commended.’
Second prize was awarded to Neha Mathew, MA Fashion Entrepreneurship and Innovation, for their pitch around haav, a creative enterprise repurposing surplus fabric into sustainable home decor products. Third-prize was awarded to Caitlin Higgs, BA (Hons) Creative Direction for Fashion, for their pitch around Un:earth, a service enabling users to trace the lifespan of their clothes.
Highly commended went to Isobel Wiles, BA (Hons) Fashion Design Technology: Womenswear, and Johana Kasalicka, BA (Hons) Fashion Photography, for their pitches on CLoSh, a closet-sharing social media platform and NOVEY Zine, a new independent publication with a digital layer of augmented reality content, respectively.
You can view more detailed pitches from the finalists on the LCF TIkTok channel.
Now in its sixth year, the annual event culminates every June after an open call for submissions to LCF students across all year groups for ideas for an innovative product or service that they feel could make a real difference to a community, client or consumer group.
This year’s final took place on 15 June at Soho Works 180 Strand in London, where the five LCF students short-listed as finalists 'pitched’ their ideas to a judging panel of esteemed industry representatives comprised of Amma Amihyia (Senior Manager, The Wall Group), Ioan Williams (General Manager and Membership Manager, Soho Works), Jonathan Chippindale, (CEO, Holition), Karen Baines (Head of Group Marketing and Communications, Shaftesbury PLC) and Linda Roberts (London College of Fashion, UAL, Director of Graduate Futures and Business and Innovation). As part of the event, there was also a keynote speech given by Ashwini Deshpande, 3D fashion designer at Meta, Director of 3D Production, Republiqe andfounder of Art-Z, a sustainable fashion software startup. Ashwini is also a London College of Fashion alumna with a first-class degree in BA (Hons) Fashion Design and Development as well as a former Enterprise Challenge runner-up
"Shaftesbury is delighted to be part of this exciting initiative to support a variety of emerging talent. Our ethos is to encourage entrepreneurship and seek independent and creative new concepts for our shopping and dining portfolio in Carnaby, Chinatown, Soho and Seven Dials. The Enterprise Challenge is a brilliant example of this ethos, and marks another chapter of our long standing partnership with London College of Fashion, which has endured for over a decade." - Karen Baines, Head of Group Marketing and Communications, Shaftesbury PLC
The five students selected to take part in yesterday’s final were chosen by a carefully selected committee of influential representatives from across the creative industries that included Ian Mason (Founder, Rainbow Bridge Education, Humble Hub and Future Leaders Network)), Ian Smart (Co-Founder, Impact Central), Muchaneta Kapfunde (Founder and Editor-in-Chief, FashNerd), and Youwie Roes (Talent Acquisition Manager, Eyes on Talents) who is also supporting the first-prize winner with marketing promotion.
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