Langat raises Double Dee's profile at Harvard competition

Stella Langat ’16 is on a roll. Last April, she took the $20,000 first prize in the Kenneth A. Freirich Business Plan Competition with Double Dee’s, the firm she has founded to provide undergarments to Kenyan women at a reasonable price so they can avoid resorting to an illegal second-hand market.

Now she has taken the $2000 second prize in the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business Innovation Competition, held October 16 as part of the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business Convention in Boston. The other seven semi-finalists included teams from such countries at Sweden, Bangladesh and France.

The teams had eight minutes to pitch their businesses, followed by questions from judges and the audience. “It was really tough,” Langat said. “I had to be calm and strategic.”

With help from three friends in Kenya she has enlisted in Double Dee’s, Langat introduced the firm’s new line of bras in Nairobi in August and will soon move into production. With orders already in hand for 450 bras, she’ll use additional prize money from the Harvard competition to produce a greater quantity and bring down the per-unit price.

Langat is one of several past Freirich Competition winners teaching business-plan writing workshops to help students prepare for the competition. Students with ideas either for for-profit businesses or non-profit enterprises oriented toward social entrepreneurship may still participate by submitting the intent-to-compete form you’ll find here.

Seventeen members of Skidmore Women in Business attended the Intercollegiate Business Conference, which included a job fair with Boston startups and businesses and featured keynote speakers with Nike, Sam’s Club and Bain & Company.