Year 10 students at Thomas Deacon Academy (TDA), in partnership with Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) Peterborough, have been hard at work helping to rebrand local used office furniture company, LOF Office Furniture.
The project is part of LOF Office Furniture’s partnership with ARU Peterborough, providing budding entrepreneurs with real life projects.
The latest project involved the TDA students rebranding the 50-year-old company and designing an ad campaign to highlight the positive work LOF does in saving office furniture from going to landfill.
Postgraduate Business and Supply Chain students at ARU Peterborough have been providing consultancy advice to LOF Office Furniture on branding, supply chain processes and sustainability as part of a real-life business project. And this latest collaboration saw the ARU Peterborough students transfer their knowledge to the Thomas Deacon Academy pupils by supporting them with their ad campaigns.
Nicola Ford, Managing Partner of LOF Office Furniture, said: “I am very passionate about supporting young talent, and our partnership with ARU Peterborough is allowing us to test these young minds in real-world business situations while taking on board new and different ideas for our own rebrand journey from an array of minds.”
The Enterprise Week saw Thomas Deacon Academy pupils come together in teams to research, source materials and develop their own ideas. At the end of each day, a panel consisting of senior members from LOF Office Furniture, Thomas Deacon Academy and ARU Peterborough judged the pupils’ presentations.
The overall Enterprise Week winners - Valiya Khatoon, Aneesah Bibi, Andreja Jokubauskyte, and Marinela Mustafa – came together at the end of the week to receive their prizes from TDA and LOF Office Furniture, and were invited to spend a day at the ARU Peterborough campus.
Dr Cheryl Greyson, Senior Business Lecturer at ARU Peterborough, said: “This has been an incredible opportunity for my students to not only gain real-life consultancy experience with a local company, which will give them the chance to gain better jobs when they graduate, but they have also been able to share their knowledge with 180 younger students from TDA and hopefully inspire them to go to university and work in business in the future.
“We’ve been so inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit of the students at TDA and LOF Office Furniture’s willingness to get involved in this project!”
Emily Gaunt, Acting Principal of Thomas Deacon Academy, part of Thomas Deacon Education Trust (TDET), said: “It was a fantastic experience for our Year 10 students to take part in this unique project for Enterprise Week. Thank you to both LOF Office Furniture and ARU for this brilliant opportunity! As well as gaining real-life work experience in the areas of branding, marketing and consultancy, the students collaborated with business students from ARU to put together and present an advertising campaign. They came back full of enthusiasm and inspired for what they could achieve in the future!”
LOF Office Furniture will be working with Thomas Deacon Academy to include some of the Year 10 students' marketing ideas in the TDA Christmas newsletter to announce the LOF rebrand planned for the end of the year.