STUDENT
ENTREPRENEUR IS A ‘SHOE IN’ FOR SUCCESS
At a time when most young people are just thinking about their career options, 21-year- old entrepreneur Sarah Watkinson-Yull has already launched a successful shoe company in her first year at Westminster Business School.
Sarah, who’s originally from Oxfordshire, studied fashion for a year at the Philip Green Retail Academy and worked in her family’s business learning the import and export business while saving money to launch her own start-up.
“I‘ve always been really interested in business as a career and wanted my own business, but I wasn’t sure what that business would be. Then, as I developed an interest in fashion and in particular shoes, I started thinking about creating my own shoe brand,” she says.
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Soon after, she started the BA Business Management course at Westminster Business School. “I chose Westminster Business School because the course content sounded great, the campus is in a fantastic location in Central London, and the degree enables you to specialise in a particular topic in the second and third years,” she says. “This really attracted me as one of the specialism options is entrepreneurship which was just perfect for me and what I want to pursue in the future.
Sarah developed a business plan Yull Shoes during her first year at Westminster, putting her new knowledge into practice and getting practical help and advice from her lecturers.
“The most useful thing I have learnt on the course so far was the work on online retail and I was able to implement the ideas into my own work with Yull Shoes,” says Sarah, who recently launched a company website and has set up an online store for customers. “I’m really looking forward to the entrepreneurship modules, which concentrate on how to make business start ups a success using real life examples, plus you get to interview an entrepreneur as part of the course, so that will be really useful for me.”
Learning to balance working while studying full time has been a challenge at times for high achieving Sarah, but she has found motivation in the support from fellow students and staff at the business school and the continuing growth of Yull Shoes. She has been busy setting up agreements with various boutique stockists in the UK and is seeing the
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