The Story of Prezentos: Master's Students at HSE University Create ‘Gifts with a Taste of Happiness’
Graduate students from HSE University’s Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod campuses have created Prezentos—an online shop featuring unique gifts. The students spoke to the HSE News Service about how their master’s programme at HSE University brings its students together and inspires them to create their own commercial projects.
‘Buying a gift is probably the most frequent and the trickiest problem to solve today,’ believes Nadezhda Engashova, the project’s marketer and a second-year student of the Master's Programme in Integrated Communications at HSE University. ‘There are many products, but it is difficult to find a high-quality, beautiful, and unique item that will be remembered.’
Prezentos Today
—We are actively developing now: we have launched two products and we are working with feedback and planning steps for expansion. We want as many people as possible to get to know our products and experience pleasant emotions by giving them to their loved ones or to themselves.
Speaking of steps already taken, for Valentine’s Day, we launched our first product: bean-to-bar chocolate bars created by chocolatiers with years of experience.
Bean-to-bar is a production technology in which the entire chocolate-making process takes place within one manufactory.
We designed stylish gift wrapping for the chocolates, using black and white photographs, and dedicated each bar to a different flavour. For example, our bitter chocolate is ‘the taste of love’, the milk chocolate is ‘the taste of tenderness’, the most unusual white chocolate with lemongrass and lemon is ‘the taste of childhood’, and the milk chocolate with juniper and lemon—which, by the way, won the first Russian Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Award—is ‘the taste of happiness’.
For International Women’s Day, we released a gift-wrapped pink tulip-scented candle created by a perfumer with ten years of experience bringing amazing fragrances to life. We searched for this candle on social media, in individual workshops, on marketplaces, through acquaintances, and ended up almost accidentally finding a perfumer who creates niche perfumes and scented candles with unique scents.
‘We work with private manufacturers, looking for those who are passionate about their business and produce a quality product that only needs external refinement and addition in the form of gift design,’ says Maria Chagina, second-year student of the Master's Programme in Finance at HSE University in Nizhny Novgorod. ‘In the very first stage of negotiations, we always get acquainted with the product, try it out for ourselves, test it, and only then do we start to refine its appearance and put it on sale.’
Project Future
—Our plans are quite ambitious: we want to create a strong and high-quality brand of unique gifts that will become a confident player in the gift market. At the same time, we want to keep both the careful selection of suppliers and the amazing and exciting feeling we have working on the project today.
We see our key mission as helping people live in the modern rhythm of life, give and experience emotion, and remember what really matters
We only take orders for Moscow at the moment, but in the future, we plan to expand the list of cities for delivery.
‘We started working on the project during the first year of our master's programme at HSE University in one of the MAGOLEGO tech startup courses,’ says Elena Nikitina, second-year student of the Master's Programme in Marketing: Digital Technologies and Marketing Communications. ‘However, the idea originated much earlier.’
‘Gift Story’
—In 2020, I launched two fairly successful media projects. A year later I realised that what I wanted most was to work on a ‘gift story’, to work with a team of like-minded people to create a brand specialising in gifts, a brand that would be different from what is currently in the market.
With the aim of working the idea through and implementing it, I enrolled in the Master's Programme in Marketing: Digital Technologies and Marketing Communications at HSE University. I began to study strategic marketing and related areas that could be useful in the project—product management, leadership, financial management, PR, and the specifics of startup development—and then I came up with my idea in the tech startup course, which helped shape the project’s final look and take the first steps in launching it.
Maria Chagina, second-year student of the Master's Programme in Finance at HSE University in Nizhny Novgorod
An HSE University master's programme helps you see beyond the classroom, think critically, and train your watchfulness, while also giving you hard skills you need in the professional world, such as financial analysis, management accounting, and business process engineering.
Project Team:
Maria Chagina – finance, long-term strategy
Elena Nikitina – product management, team leader
Nadezhda Engashova – marketing
Arina Anikina – design
The Master's Programme in Finance is a practice-oriented programme for those who want to become financial market leaders. The programme places great emphasis on project work, which is supported by its partners–leading Russian and foreign companies. The programme’s extensive network of business partners immerses students in the professional environment and allows them to solve real-world financial and business problems during the course of the programme.