We love the mythology of innovation: the lone genius sketching on a napkin, the lightning bolt idea that changes everything overnight. It’s a story we like to tell because it’s clean, cinematic, and easy to celebrate. But anyone who has built something worth keeping knows the truth: ideas don’t thrive in a vacuum. They need frameworks. They need support. They need people and systems that push them from potential to reality.

At L’Oréal Brandstorm 2025, we saw that support up close. On the surface, it’s billed as an innovation competition— a chance to pitch an idea and win a global title. But what we discovered was something deeper: a deliberately designed environment for growth, one that challenged us to think harder, collaborate better, and rise to the level of the room.

There were three of us, each fluent in a different language of creation. Each different by design — and stronger for it.

Scott Lee Hon See was momentum— vision-forward, relentlessly imaginative in the best sense, the kind of thinker who could spot opportunity in ambiguity, turning vague possibility into direction.

Vincent Pearce was precision— translating concepts into clean form, bringing both aesthetic intuition and technical fluency, ensuring every idea stood tall and held under pressure.

And I was articulation— ensuring every detail connected, resonated, and could carry weight beyond the pitch, giving shape to instinct and rhythm to complexity.

Together, we built MuscleGlow™, a post-gym skincare wipe engineered to launch an entirely new category: performance skincare. Cooling, hydrating, UV-protecting, and subtly enhancing muscle definition. A Trojan horse for self-care, designed to meet men where they already were— the post-workout moment— and expand their understanding of what taking care of themselves could look like. Our overarching goal? To address the stubbornly low adoption rates in men’s skincare by reframing care as effortless, familiar, and stigma-free.

To our surprise, it worked.

We won the UK & Ireland national final, selected from 4,394 participants and 167 pitches. In that moment, we weren’t just a team. We were Team FutureFace, representing not just a region, but a belief: that care, when designed with honesty and intention, can change everything.

The global finals in Paris were different. Bigger. Brighter. Louder.

But what stood out wasn’t the scale of the competition. It was the structure behind it. L’Oréal hadn’t simply staged an event; they had built an ecosystem— one that demanded more than polished pitches or clever ideas. It pushed us to refine our instincts, stretch our collaboration, and meet the weight of the room. In Paris, we learned that the real prize wasn’t recognition. It was being shaped into the kind of people who could carry their ideas further than any stage could.

Where Guidance Becomes Growth

What changed us most in Paris wasn’t the stage; it was the people behind the scenes who taught us how to stand on it.

Alberta “Abi” Mason and Theo Algar understood that their role wasn’t to hand us solutions but to challenge us toward better ones.

Abi was our wings. She had a way of asking questions that stayed with you long after the conversation ended. They weren’t about tweaking a slide or rehearsing a line; they were for deeper thinking, the kind that makes you unravel your assumptions, rebuild your arguments, and rediscover the core with intention. She pushed us past perfecting our pitch and into the hard work of articulating why our idea truly mattered.

Theo was our spine. When the pressure mounted, he became our rallying point— lifting our spirits, amplifying our confidence, and keeping us aligned when stress threatened to scatter us. He brought an energy that changed the temperature of the room. Where Abi pushed us inward, Theo pulled us back up, reminding us, in the moments we felt like crumbling, that we were capable of more than we thought. He sharpened our message, yes, but more importantly, he gave us the conviction to deliver it.

What they gave us wasn’t polish, it was substance. They prepared us for the rooms that shape careers, where every idea is challenged, where clarity is power, and where well-built thinking speaks louder than any visual ever could.

The Global Stage: The Gift of Being Measured Against the Best

Paris stripped away the myth of innovation as a solo pursuit. From a record-breaking 242,000 registrants, only a fraction arrived here, bringing with them more than business cases. They brought a way of thinking shaped by their own cultures, disciplines, and ambitions.

In one corner, a team framed beauty as a collective act, rooted in community rather than vanity. Across the table, another group presented like storytellers, their solution layered and deliberate. Others approached the brief like engineers, dismantling complexity until only what was functional and inevitable remained. It was less a competition than a survey of how the world thinks when given the same problem.

At first, you can’t help but measure yourself against them. Are we enough? Do we belong? But the room quickly shifts you. You stop comparing and start listening. The questions become sharper: What do they see that we don’t? What do we bring that no one else can?

The most valuable moments, I would say, weren’t on stage but in the corridors with professionals from L’Oréal’s global network who didn’t speak to us as students, but as peers. They weren’t there to applaud polite ideas; they engaged with them, questioned them, and in doing so reframed how we understood our own work. It wasn’t criticism for its own sake. It was an invitation to think beyond the competition and measure our ideas against reality.

That was the real work of Brandstorm: the collisions. The awkward debates in borrowed meeting rooms. The generosity of competitors who should have been rivals. The disorienting, necessary act of having your idea taken apart by someone who sees the world differently.

We like to celebrate innovation as a spark, an act of individual genius. The global finals made it plain: the best ideas are forged collectively, in rooms that demand humility, curiosity, and the willingness to have your definition of excellence undone and then rebuilt.

For us, Brandstorm was never just a competition; it was a reminder that growth rarely happens in comfort. We learned to challenge one another without ego. To take feedback as fuel. To understand that great ideas aren’t found, they’re built. Built in rooms that require your best and give you the courage to deliver it.

Why Most Companies Miss the Point Entirely

It’s worth saying: most corporations still get this wrong.

They treat student engagement as a PR exercise— a chance to post on LinkedIn about how much they “value young voices.” They run hackathons that prioritize theatre over substance. They use competitions as idea-mining operations, not as opportunities to build talent pipelines.

But when you strip away the gloss, what they’re doing is transactional: extracting ideas without investing in the people behind them.

Brandstorm is different. It refuses the theatre. It doesn’t just gather students for a showcase of ingenuity; it builds an ecosystem that forces you to rise to the standard of the room. It understands what so many corporations miss: that ideas aren’t born fully formed and don’t survive on inspiration alone. They need to be shaped, by mentors who won’t settle for your first answer, by environments that test your assumptions, by feedback sharp enough to cut through the noise.

That is the work most companies avoid, because it’s slower. Less glamorous. Harder to package into a press release. But it’s the work that builds capacity, not just for better ideas, but for the people capable of carrying them into the world.

If more organizations approached innovation this way, they’d stop treating creativity like a commodity to be mined and start seeing it for what it really is: a discipline, one that thrives only when you invest in the people brave enough to practice it.

The Lessons That Outlast the Stage

And although we didn’t leave Paris with a trophy. We left with something harder to measure, and far more enduring: clarity.

Clarity about how we think. About how we work. About the kind of people, we want to be in the rooms that matter— not just presenters of ideas, but collaborators, leaders, and thinkers willing to be stretched.

Because Brandstorm was never about winning. It was about becoming. It was about learning how to deliver under pressure, how to adapt without coming undone, and how to challenge one another without ego. It was about building the muscles you don’t know you’ll need until later: resilience, humility, intellectual curiosity, and the courage to hold your ground when it counts.

The spotlight is easy to define: trophies, headlines, applause. But there’s another kind of space, one with fewer signposts. No finish line. No press release. Just the quiet after. The stretch between effort and recognition. Between knowing you gave everything and accepting that not everyone will see it.

That’s not failure. That’s the real work that changes you.

Because almost isn’t failure. It’s the threshold. The place where doubt sharpens instinct, where vision finds focus, where the most honest work begins to take root.

And maybe that’s the point. In a world obsessed with visibility, perhaps the most radical thing you can do is move with purpose— even when no one’s watching