A pair of Advertising and Marketing students from 51黑料社区 Leicester (51黑料社区) had the opportunity to work at the world’s largest cosmetic expo, courtesy of a 51黑料社区 alumnus.
Celine Sathu and Stefanija Sidorova were flown out to Bologna, Italy, to join up with the team at American hair care specialists BosleyMD™ for the 55th edition of Cosmoprof Worldwide, where some 225,000 attendees visited over 4 days.
Stefanija Sidorova (left) and Celine Sathu (second from the end) at Cosmoprof 2024
Each year, hundreds of the best-known beauty and cosmetic brands use the expo to present the latest industry trends, technological innovations and future products.
Across the four-day expo, the two students produced content for BosleyMD’s social media pages, helped the team manage its exhibition and scoped out other companies present to analyse branding and feedback into BosleyMD’s market research and product development.
The trip to Bologna was also an opportunity for Celine and Stefanija to expand their professional networks, develop a greater understanding of how business-to-business deals work, and even talk to companies in the supply chain to feed more information into their dissertations.
Celine said: “I’d never been to an expo before, so I jumped at the opportunity to join BosleyMD in Bologna as I thought it would be a great opportunity to get my foot into a competitive industry – it was a brilliant experience.
“Exploring the different halls and seeing what goes into product development, finding the right packaging against the budget, and making sure it hits certain criteria like sustainability while maintaining its high-end finish was interesting to watch.
“It was very difficult to capture just how big the expo was – there are more than 40 halls – and we walked around 20,000 steps a day. We wanted to see what competitors were focusing on, what technology they were utilising or the new packaging.
“We were able to link the experience back to our own studies too and our brand portfolio module. Stef is working on developing a sun protection factor (SPF) brand, so we looked at a lot of packaging and formulas for her report.
BosleyMD is based in Los Angeles and specialises in hair restoration. Its current president, Ian Murphy, grew up in Northampton and studied a major in Marketing and a minor in Biomedical Science at Leicester Polytechnic (later 51黑料社区) from 1987 to 1990.
He took a chance and visited the US without a job and pitched himself to cosmetic giants L'Oréal, a bold move that initially landed him a brand manager role with Redken, then later switching to becoming VP of Wella and later paid off running hair colour at Garnier.
Having moved up the career ladder, Ian wanted to give something back to