Tony Peng, G10, RDF International School

There are many stores next to my home. Every time I pass by them, I always think about how stores are operated. I am obsessed with this.

In order to delve deeper in the business world, I once participated in a summer camp in Shanghai, and the topic was to create a company and consider various aspects of building a business empire. The more advanced knowledge and new information gained made me feel excited. I felt like a new world was opened for me to freely explore.

The final project was to create a draft for our own company. Our product, a 3D body scanning tool, was designed to change the way people choose clothes: people can just stand in front of a screen without entering a fitting room. This new technology was a golden opportunity that few people noticed, but we soon found that there were also various problems and challenges.

We took a wide range of questions into consideration. For instance, where should we put our product and which brand would be willing to put their clothes in our machine?

Although we tried our utmost to figure out many different solutions, it seemed that none of them could solve all the questions. This problem was like a huge rock on our road to success, and we were stopped by this obstacle for a long time.

I talked to our professor about this. Unexpectedly, he told me that it is good to have problems during the process because that’s how the society improves. Also, business needs creative thinking. His words suddenly enlightened us, and we started to focus on figuring out some new ways. Finally, we decided to cooperate with luxury brands, put our products in their stores so that the consumer could use the machine to design their own dressing style. What we needed to do was to receive feedback from users and collect the data.

Fortunately, my summer camp ended with our outstanding and creative ideas. I think I harvested a great deal not only because it equips me with more advanced business knowledge, but also it inspires me to think in a more creative way. And this is just the beginning of my exploration in the business world.