KUCHING: A total of four Kuching Community College students made it to the finals of SME Bank 90-Days Business Challenge 2019 which will be held on July 6 to 8 in Kuala Lumpur.
The finals will witness a total of 20 finalists from Community Colleges and Polytechnics nationwide vying for the championship title which the winners would bring home cash prizes and SME Bank 90-Days Challenge 2019 trophy.
The entrepreneurial-type competition is an initiative of SME Bank for students as a platform to them to educate themselves on entrepreneurship.
This is also the second year that Kuching Community College made it to the final of the competition as they were the first runner-up of the competition back in 2017.
Two years ago, the team competed by bringing a tourism product but this year they will raise the stakes on Chandani Fashion, a supplier and retailer of waterproof scarfs.
The company is fully owned by Kuching Community College students from the entrepreneurial incubators programme.
Among them are owner and manager Fathin Athirah Faizul Afsar along with Nurul Izzah Dahlan, Siti Masitah Abdul Rahman and Sabrina Jasmine Abu Hassan. All four students are from the Fashion and Apparel certificate programme.
An area of strength for Chandani Fashion is the uniqueness of their product. To date, they are the only supplier of waterproof scarfs in Sarawak. Complete with nanotech coating that allows the product to be waterproof, it has features such as easy to clean and dry.
Apart from that the employees of Chandani Fashion are trained accordingly allowing them to gain experience in the fashion and entrepreneurship sector.
The team are under the guidance and supervision of Nurul Dafiqah Kamarulzaman, Nur Izzah Abdul Kadir and Nur Yasmin Yaman, three of the lecturers from the college.
According to Nurul Dafiqah, the involvement of Chandani Fashion in the Entrepreneurial Incubation programme was as early as June 2018. During the period, the performance of the company has been closely supervised by SME Bank.
“Last March, they have joined a boot camp session in Selangor to prepare them on entrepreneurship. During the boot camp, Centre for Entrepreneur Research and Development Sdn. Bhd. (CEDAR), a subsidiary of SME Bank had delivered a talk and a workshop to help the students in preparing their proposal.
“They are also exposed on leadership skills, motivation talks and public speaking to increase their self-confidence when addressing a large crowd.
“At the moment, Chandani Fashion is operating at Kuching Community College building and currently offering service to entrepreneurs based in Sarawak and after that they are planning to increase their sales by expanding their product market to Brunei.
“As the only representative from Sarawak, Kuching Community College has high hopes that we can make the state proud on a national level and bring home the champion’s trophy,” she expressed.
