A real founder. A real launch. Seventeen students with 90 minutes to crack it.
IE University's BSIS program brings its top cohort - 21-24 year olds from Armenia, Peru, Colombia, across Europe - to New York for immersive learning.
The ask: design something that doesn't feel like school.
Victoria Charles Koudou's family has farmed cacao in Côte d'Ivoire for generations. She'd spent years in luxury retail - Saint Laurent, Prada - before connecting those worlds: Gnakoury Cacao, a luxury chocolate brand rooted in African heritage.
She was weeks from launch. Pre-revenue. Four flavors perfected. Packaging still in flux. Interest from SSENSE, Jacquemus, Brooklyn Museum - but no clear path to market.
The question she brought wasn't hypothetical: how do you launch a luxury brand when you're competing with established players, working lean, and unwilling to compromise on design or mission?
We positioned Victoria as client, not guest lecturer. Students became her go-to-market team - responsible for decisions she was genuinely weighing.
The sprint moved through four zones:
- Brand Spine - Teams drew tension tiles (Legacy vs. Disruption, Mission vs. Margin) and defined their strategic posture in ten words. Not a mission statement exercise - a forcing function.
- Cultural Signals - Cards surfaced market forces: Quiet Luxury holding steady, Preorder Backlash rising, Founder Fatigue setting in. Teams mapped how their strategy would hold if trendsflipped.
- GTM Studio - Five decisions, each with tradeoffs. Launch posture: flag-planting or whisper drop? Conversion logic: aesthetic signal or mission alignment? Activation stack across four months with one move under $2K and one requiring a partner.
- Pre-Mortem & Wildcards - A skeptical investor. A cultural critic questioning authenticity. Then mid-pitch: Jacquemus wants 1,000 bars next week. Do you say yes?
One student captured the design intent exactly: "What I liked the most - and the most challenging - was the bonus round. It took us to recognize the flaws in our GTM."
Another noted what made it different from typical coursework: "Framework is fun while tackling key issues. Appreciate the entries for more creative thinking, which is usually out of scope."
When asked what was most valuable, the answers kept circling back to the same things:
"Using a real startup."
The ones that required us to make trade offs."
"The chance to discuss ideas and collaborate."
And Victoria walked away with four distinct approaches to her actual launch - pressure-tested by people with no reason to be polite.
