Learning by Doing: Student Entrepreneurs Isabella and Henry and their Prize-Winning Education Clubs

Aiglon Year 9 Enterprise Fusion programme asks students to do something most adults find difficult: build a real business from scratch, make mistakes in public, and learn from them in real time. For most students, that begins with an idea. For Isabella (Year 11), it began with a stack of flyers on the streets of Shanghai.

When Isabella was in second grade, she and her brother Henry (Year 7) took to their Shanghai neighbourhood with a stack of flyers. Their mother had just opened an educational club in a nearby venue and it needed customers. So they went out and found some.

Explorelife Family Club now fills two large buildings in Shanghai: gym, sports hall,library, English classes, baking studio, crafting rooms, and a steel museum stocked with coins and metal objects from around the world, some collected by the family’s own great-grandfather. It is the largest family education club of its kind in the city, with a third Shanghai branch in development and Singapore on the horizon.

Isabella, now 14 and having just finished Year 10 at Aiglon, runs the business as teenage CEO. Her younger brother Henry, who has strong opinions about every aspect of the business, works alongside her as her closest collaborator. He will take Enterprise Fusion himself in the coming years.

The club exists because their mother looked at Shanghai’s after-school landscape and found it wanting. The programmes on offer in the Chinese city were rigid, examination-focused and, by the standards she had encountered in Europe, joyless. She wanted a place where children could learn English, do sport, bake, build things and think, all in the same afternoon.

“In China, we don't have playing and learning at the same time,” Isabella says. “That was the whole point of the club.” 

Both siblings have shaped that vision as much as grown up inside it. Henry puts it bluntly on why their involvement matters.

“Adults could use a lot of help from kids,” he says.”Kids are not afraid of new ideas.”

Acting on that philosophy alongside their mother takes real discipline. Running a family business has its specific challenges, and both Isabella and Henry know that decisions don’t always go their way. But in the Lin family, consensus comes easily.

“We discuss things,” she says. “We don’t argue. We work out the best plan.”

In November 2025, Isabella took that experience to a TEDx stage in Shanghai. Her talk, I Became My Mom’s Business Partner, explored what going into business with a parent actually means—the trust it demands and what you discover about someone when you work alongside them every day. The same year, Explorelife won the Forbes China Most Investable Company Award.

When Isabella started Enterprise Fusion this year, the methodology felt familiar. Trial and error, design thinking, learning by doing—these were not new concepts. They were simply what building Explorelife had always looked like within a new context.

“I recognised the approach,”says Isabella, “but I also had to learn how to collaborate with very different kinds of people.” 

Working with Henry is one thing. But working with classmates from 20 different countries is something else entirely.

“People think differently and see things differently,” she says. “That can make your business better.” 

As the cadet, Henry’s ambitions are larger than life: companies in multiple countries, the Explorelife model carried into new languages, new cities, and new formats.

As the original family business pioneer, Isabella is still reaching for the stars but has a strong connection to the simpler lessons of the past—the unglamorous work of building something from nothing. Asked what she would tell another young person sitting on an idea, she doesn’t hesitate.

“Take children seriously. It’s not just an idea. It can become something real.”

Teacher Jack George, Jack George, Assistant Head at Aiglon, who oversees Years 9–11 at Aiglon, has seen a great many student enterprise projects. He hasn’t seen many that look like this.

“Most student leadership still operates within a school framework,”he says. “This is independent of any of that, it’s a real business at an international level. It’s the pinnacle of what student leadership can look like.” 

What he notices as much as success of the business itself is how both sibling entrepreneurs behave as people. 

“They have every reason to be haughty,” he says.”But they’re not. That balance of mind, body and spirit are huge achievements, but not thinking you’re any different to anybody else— that’s what Aiglon really works to build."