Last month, Businessweek published an article entitled “Business Plan Contests: Where Are the Women?,” which discussed how there are hardly any women participating in college venture competitions. Fortunately, this is not true at Boston College; a team called My Savvy Shoes won first place in the Boston College Venture Competition (BCVC) this year! The four women – Alexa Fleischman, Lauren Wallace, Amanda McBride, and Brynne Lee – were the first all-female team to win BCVC.
BCVC was founded five years ago by Bill Clerico (BC ’07) to foster entrepreneurship at BC. The competition thus far has been extremely successful, launching successful businesses like WakeSmart and PIQC. The competition reaches out to students of all majors who have innovative ideas for new businesses. All the teams have to formulate and deliver a sales pitch, followed by a business plan that is due in March. The BCVC board arranges events and contacts BC alumni that can act as mentors for the students as they work with the technical aspects of creating a successful business. On April 13, 2011, the finalists presented pitches to a panel of judges. My Savvy Shoes tied for first place with another team called Additupp, and each team received $6,500 to launch their business.
The idea for My Savvy Shoes is pretty simple: they are creating shoes with interchangeable parts, so that girls can mix and match different designs. According to Alexa, the idea was something they “had been playing with for a while.” The team began discussing this idea their freshmen year, when one of the girls had a pair of flats with pearl clusters that kept popping off. The four girls thought it would be a cool idea to have shoes they could alter, and thus the idea of My Savvy Shoes was born.
The team is made up of two seniors at Boston College – Alexa Fleischman and Brynne Lee – along with two seniors from Babson College – Lauren Wallace and Amanda McBride. The four girls study in different schools and have different majors, but they are all interested in combining their passions and studies with entrepreneurship. “Diversity is what is responsible for the strength of our plan,” the women say. They believe that their different backgrounds help them stand out from other entrepreneurship teams. They also admire other female entrepreneurs, such as Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss from the company Rent the Runway.
Although they loved BCVC, all of the girls admit that creating a company is extremely difficult. “It was intimidating at first to think of turning just an idea into a feasible plan with an actual consumer product.” They also struggled with putting together the business plan, as their different locations made it difficult to meet up regularly.
From this experience, this team of motivated women learned how to adapt, organize, and be creative. All four of the women say they are extremely excited about the future of My Savvy Shoes and thankful for everything they learned from the BCVC experience.