Winners not resting on laurels
A team of student entrepreneurs whose eco-friendly lip balm is available from 18 Canterbury retailers are using their prize-winnings at the national Young Enterprise Scheme awards to expand into the rest of the South Island.
Timaru Boys’ High School students Josh Earnshaw, Mackenzie Annett, Jack Blakemore, and Hamish Stayt beat 1038 teams from across New Zealand to win the National Excellence Award for Sales and Marketing and the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand Award for Accounting and Finance at the awards ceremony in Wellington recently.
Each award came with a $1000 cash prize which will be pumped into growing their winning business, Ecobase, a startup company producing environmentally-sustainable cosmetics.
‘‘Our ultimate goal is to disrupt the New Zealand cosmetics market with products that minimise waste and have gender-neutral packaging,’’ Earnshaw, Ecobase’s chief executive, told The
Timaru Herald.
‘‘We’re excited for next year, when we’re going to really be ramping up our efforts.’’
The team also got second place for the National Excellence Award for Environmental Sustainability, while Josh was third for the national CEO of the Year Award – which he was ‘‘pretty stoked’’ about, as it would help fund a leadership course.
As part of the scheme, the team developed a 100 per cent biodegradable lip balm.
The wax-coated cardboard tubes hold seven grams of vanilla honeyflavoured lip balm, made from South Canterbury-sourced ingredients including almond oil, organic beeswax, organic clover honey, manuka honey, and vanilla oil.
All four students are headed to university in Christchurch next year. They planned to juggle study with developing two new lip balm flavours, tropical and mixed berry, and distributing their products across the South Island.
‘‘It will be a New Zealand company providing the different oils,’’ Josh said.
It was important to support ‘‘local’’ companies during the unprecedented times of Covid-19, he said.
They were also looking at developing environmentally-sustainable moisturiser, insect repellent, cologne, and deodorants – though the focus for now was on lip balm.
Josh said plastic packaging was an ‘‘issue across the entire cosmetics industry’’, but the team chose to develop a lip balm because they could find no sustainable and ‘‘sociallyresponsible’’ options for it.
Since the team started selling their vanilla honey lip balm in June, they had shifted 3500 units online and to retailers in Timaru, Temuka, Geraldine, Fairlie, Christchurch, and Oamaru.
Roncalli College’s team of four – Zack Robb, Toby Scannell, Dharma Van Diepen and Ainemaria Burrell – known as Destination, were also finalists after winning the regional South Canterbury Company of the Year for its project the Journey Bag – a wet and dry multi-use travel bag.