How was writing a business plan and preparing for a business plan competition helpful to Katie Beauchamp and Hayley Barna while Birchbox was still in the planning, testing, and prototyping stage?

Katie Beauchamp and Hayley Barna met on their first day at Harvard Business School. They volunteered to co-coordinate a spring holiday for themselves and 50 of their classmates. Through the experience they realized that they worked well together as a team, but at that time, they had no thought of cofounding a business. That all changed just over a year later, when Beauchamp and Barna launched Birchbox, a beauty samples subscription service that now has over one million monthly subscribers in five countries.