Team Growth Hackers from BITS Pilani walk away with the winners title of L'Oreal Sustainability Challenge 2019

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Spanning B-Schools and a handful of engineering colleges, the L'Oreal Sustainability Challenge 2019 was a mix of employer branding with the principles of sustainable development. Yet with the odds stacked against us, we were able to put up a good performance take home the prize.

Overcoming lack of information

There were 5 teams that made it to the finals. Interestingly we were the only engineering team that made it up there and were up against teams from institutes like the IIM Shillong, XLRI and ISB. Although every team was great, we believed the team from ISB had a very strong pitch and its members had a lot of industry experience under their belt. They had the best chance of winning we felt.

When it came to us, we focused on basics and tried to cover all three aspects of the 3R strategy. We were confident that if we can make all the strategies coherent and align them with a single goal of sustainability, we would have a better chance of winning the competition. We started working on the problem in September and worked on it till October. The biggest challenge we faced was the lack of data and hence we had to assume many things. We weren't confident enough with the business feasibility of our challenge but we somehow managed to put up something concrete in terms of ideas.

A smooth experience worth remembering 

The competition was pretty much smooth sailing in terms of logistics and organisation. This made our friendship stronger in the process. The quality of judgement was great as all the esteemed judges gave us their point of view and critically assessed the solutions provided by the teams. The competition was also relevant to the current context and had room to make an impact. The biggest learning point we would take from this experience was that one should stick to basics and always provide a solution which can be easily adopted and implemented. Sometimes even the most complex problems have the simplest solutions.

The moment that stands out from the rest is when we were announced as winners of the L'Oreal Sustainability Challenge 2019. It took a while to sink in and given the fact that we were the underdogs and nobody really expected us to win, it became that much sweeter.