If we add up the ages of Eduardo Iracheta, Eider Burgos, Aurora Isla, Ane Aldaya and Laura Ruiz, the young people that make up the junior company Hebe Bilbao, we shall barely reach an age of one hundred. These five young entrepreneurs launched the HEBE Bilbao project only ten months ago with the idea of promoting the work of creative and fashion designers from Bilbao and Bizkaia, and along the way they have been accumulating experience, success and mistakes, and even a prize awarded by the Spanish Confederation of Junior Businesses and the Ministry of Education to the best initiative of this type in 2014 at state level.
The search for a new understanding of the knowledge acquired at University and the ever urgent need to connect with the social reality is what sustains the creation of junior companies in universities around the country; a way young people have to learn by experience, by undertaking business projects and applying the most basic business skills.
By not ceasing to seek challenges and maintaining their unwavering curiosity, the young people at HEBE Bilbao have managed to make emerging designers more visible in areas to which they had not previously had access. One of their most recent achievements has been to enable the textile designer Itxaso Torrontegui to organise a few workshops in the Guggenheim Museum. “We deal with the online and offline communication of creative young people, we look on the Internet to see where they have their workshops, even where they study because many of the designers we contact are still studying, starting out and we sign them on”, explains Eduardo Iracheta who, at 21 years of age, speaks of a job that, to date, makes them feel good. “We are a small group, we are working on things we really like, that motivate us; as we do not have any bosses, we have to make decisions as issues arise,” says Eduardo in the belief that action-oriented teaching, learning from mistakes, ‘Learning by Doing’, is the most positive element of these months at the helm of HEBE Bilbao.
What about the future?
HEBE Bilbao is not a standard company, although it operates as a business organisation in a delimited sector and has a tax identification code (CIF) that allows it to issue invoices. Its legal form is a non-profit association that exclusively consists of students who do not receive a salary and whose profits are reinvested in the company, giving rise to new projects, training or cultural trips for its members. “As a team, we could establish a limited responsibility company or some other type of company in the future but, for now, the goal is to learn from this business experience before we finish our studies”, says Eduardo, who is studying Advertising at the UPV/EHU.
The future is still far away, HEBE Bilbao entrepreneurs are currently involved in an event that brings together five young designers who will explain the features of the fashion creation process to the audience. The activity will take place in La Ribera and will feature creations by Antxia, Atakontu, Comme des Machines, Ifelnut and Manderlay.
