With the iconic “big cheque”: Mikhail Gurevich (ENG’07, Questrom’12) (from left), who donated the $50,000 prize; winners Illiana Arroyo (CAS’25), Suraj Nellore (Questrom’26, COM’26), Jason Wexler (Questrom’25, COM’25), and Devin Hirsch (Questrom’25); and Brian O’Connor, L.L.Bean director of sustainability and global compliance. Photo courtesy of Questrom School of Business

Strategy & Innovation

BU Students Win $50,000 for Helping L.L.Bean Become More Eco-Friendly

Questrom’s second annual sustainability competition drew 71 teams from schools around the East Coast

Inexpensive clothes sold by retailers like Amazon and Shein have made it super easy to stay on top of trends. But this quickly made, cheap-quality apparel (aka “fast fashion”) has its pitfalls—on average, such clothing is worn only 10 times before being tossed in the donation pile, or worse—ultimately, 11.3 million articles of clothing end up in landfills every year in the United States alone. That’s a staggering 560 percent increase from the amount of clothes tossed in 1960, and a definitively non-eco-friendly model. 

Last month, a Questrom School of Business contest attempted to find solutions to the problem, with a $50,000 prize offered to student entrepreneurs as enticement.

The second annual Sustainability Case Competition challenged students to think of eco-friendly improvements for the event’s two sponsors, clothing and accessory outfitters Rewilder and L.L.Bean. And among the 71 undergraduate and graduate teams from 24 schools across the East Coast that took part, four BU undergrads working together nabbed the top prize of $50,000 and professional advice on how to implement their ideas.

The competition presented students with two case studies. After reading the first one in October, the 71 teams submitted strategies they believed Rewilder should use to communicate and justify the higher prices of their upcycled products, which include clothing and bags. 

After multiple rounds, the best ideas were whittled down to 24 teams for the November 18 finals, where the teams holed up at Questrom to come up with strategies for L.L.Bean to be a more sustainable business while also gaining new shoppers. The finalists presented their plans to judges, who asked questions and gave feedback before selecting the winning team: Illiana Arroyo (CAS’25), Devin Hirsch (Questrom’25), Suraj Nellore (Questrom’26, COM’26), and Jason Wexler (Questrom’25, COM’25). The Terriers dreamed up an online resale platform for L.L.Bean products, which they called “ReBean.” The two runner-up teams, from American University and UMass Boston, won bragging rights but no cash.

“Your focus on coming up with creative ideas for turning an environmental challenge into a business opportunity is very hopeful and cool,” Paul Ligon, Casella Waste Systems senior vice president of sustainable growth, said in the event’s keynote address. Casella sponsored last year’s competition and served as one of this year’s on-site industry experts.  

Competition director Greg Stoller, a Questrom master lecturer in strategy and innovation, said it was imperative to him that the competition be “audit proof,” since $50,000 was on the line. The companies’ names were kept under wraps so students couldn’t research beforehand, and the teams’ identities remained anonymous to the 24 judges, who included alumni, attorneys, engineers, entrepreneurs, and sustainability experts. 

Stoller has nearly two decades of experience running case competitions and says he loves how they boost students’ self-confidence. “They allow students to apply, in a cross-discipline manner, everything they’re learning in the classroom in a timed format,” he says. “And they also are the epitome of teamwork.”

Introducing ReBean

Shoppers are struggling with the environmental aspects of buying new, winning team member Arroyo says, and they choose to thrift both for the potential economic savings and for he thrill of the hunt that thrifting provides. A recent BU Today story on students’ love of thrifting delved into the lucrative secondhand clothing market, which is expected to reach $350 billion by 2027. 

“We’ve seen a lot of brands like Depop and ThreadUp start to grow in the past few years, so I think that’s where my initial idea for the Case Competition came from,” Arroyo says. “I thought, what if we did this for a specific brand, and explicitly sold their clothes so that people can buy them at a cheaper price or just make more sustainable purchasing options?”

Photos courtesy of L.L.Bean

The proposed ReBean platform is akin to an in-house Poshmark, in that customers would list a photo and description of their used L.L.Bean products on the business’ website for purchase by interested shoppers. This consumer-to-consumer system would allow L.L.Bean to “reach price-sensitive customers, while achieving its sustainability objectives,” the team says. L.L.Bean would take a 10 percent commission on all sales over $20. The team estimates that in the first year, the business would make $4 million in revenue, and $21 million in revenue by year five.

Hirsch, another team member, says the whole day was stressful. “When they finally announced us as the winners, it almost felt surreal. It really felt like a lot of hard work did pay off,” he says. “And I think that it’s really commendable how strong this team is. We faced steep competition from graduate students from MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Columbia. It was anonymous, so no one knew we were undergrads.”

ReBean member Wexler says the judges “liked that our idea was very focused.” In his opinion, the other teams didn’t justify their point as well as theirs did. But his team “had hundreds of numbers in our financials from a bunch of different sources. It was a very specific idea that wasn’t too complicated.” He estimates the time the team spent preparing for the competition was roughly equivalent to that of another course. 

Their $50K prize came with only one stipulation: donating 10 percent of their winnings to a registered 501(c)(3) sustainability organization. The big prize was donated by Mikhail Gurevich (ENG’07, Questrom’12), managing partner of investment firm Dominion Capital, who is passionate about sustainability. Stoller believes the $50,000 prize is the second-largest in the country for a sustainability competition.

The BU group will split the prize money; their plans range from investing their winnings to paying for a study abroad trip to covering tuition payments. And they are currently in talks with L.L.Bean about how to implement their idea, which excites Wexler the most.

“The greatest joy was that we had created something tangible that this company actually wanted to use,” he says. “And I was just so happy that all of our late nights meant something.”