MBA Alumnae Promotes Healthy Lifestyle among China’s Workers in her Detox Startup
CUHK MBA alumna Michelle Nie (right)
MBA alumna Michelle Nie shares with Financial Times how her investment banking experience has helped spark the idea for her business venture, along with her MBA classmate and co-founder Tiffany Ren.
It was while working for the China International Capital Corporation (CICC) in Beijing when Nie realized her physically and mentally demanding job left her little time to exercise or eat a healthy diet. “My lifestyle was very unhealthy and I realized that my friends also had the same problem,” Nie recalls her initial thought of starting a business of detox juices.
While studying for her MBA at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School in Hong Kong, Nie had tried detox juices. Later on her exchange program at the University of California, Berkeley, she indulged in the fashion for cold-pressed juices. Nie tells Financial Times in an interview that the detox concept was virtually unheard of in China until 2013. “That is when I thought that this might be a real opportunity.”
Nie, her CUHK MBA classmate Ren and another co-founder gave up their high-income jobs in finance in 2014 to launch JuiceUp, bringing nutritionally optimized cold-pressed fruit, nuts and vegetable juices to the Chinese market. JuiceUp now has more than 20 employees, with another 20 working in juice production.
Nie met Ren during the first week of their MBA program at CUHK Business School in 2010, where they had a chance to share a tent during an outdoor bonding exercise at the start of the course. While working at CICC, Nie met JuiceUp’s third founding member. The trio makes a perfect team, according to Nie, who describes herself as the ideas person in the company. As Ren had worked in the venture capital industry, she was instrumental in securing investors.
Formulated by an Australian nutritionist, JuiceUp’s juices have been sold in daily sets of six bottles with each bottle containing differing amounts of nutrients and sugar. The six bottles are designed to be drunk in a sequence. The concoctions are produced in Beijing with locally grown vegetables and imported fruits and nuts and are then shipped by air to more than 40 cities in China. JuiceUp has developed a new weight-loss plan called aiuwei — Whoa! in English, a-day meal replacement juices…
Click here to find out more about Nie’s and Ren’s experience of starting their business and studying at CUHK Business School for an MBA in MBA Connect Issue 9 published in August 2015.
Media: Financial Times
Section: Business Education
Date published: 10 January, 2016
Re: Michelle Nie and Tiffany Ren (MBA alumnae)