ALEX Porter basked in the reflected glory of her company's vanity mirrors at the Newport board final of Young Enterprise.

One of a team of nine from St Julian's High School, Alex helped found the company Consortium Designs.

Consortium made bespoke mirrors for men and women and sold them (after due market research) for £5.99 each.

The firm achieved sales of £201.98, a gross profit of £164.54 and net profit of £46.61.

It also produced a company report, an exhibition stand and a presentation to judges and guests at the board final in University of Wales College Newport's Caerleon campus.

Consortium's company report could certainly be admired for its frankness.

The opening paragraph began with the words: "The problem which occurred within our company is that certain individuals said they would do a certain task and failed to do so."

Welcome to the big, ugly, disillusioning world of work!

In fact, such experiences (and the more positive ones) are exactly the reason Young Enterprise exists.

The idea is to give business an airing in school environments to ensure teenagers don't forget it in the race to become butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.

Seven teams contested the Newport final, two of which are going on to the all-Gwent final at Coleg Gwent on May 13.

Sadly for Consortium, the judges did not find their mirror start-up sufficiently reflective of business excellence.

The overall winner was a greetings card company called Spectrum, founded by a team from Rougemont School.

Spectrum successfully exploited the idea of cards aimed at ethnic minorities such as Newport's Asian community. It achieved sales of £601.25, a gross profit of £350.02 and net profit of £267.02.

Runner-up was the Welsh slate clock and Valentine's gift manufacturer Athena, founded by Bassaleg School.

Sales of £403.54 resulted in a gross profit of £353.16 and a net profit of £243.37.

A team of judges, which included the Argus' Ken Lawrence, was led by Paul Phillips from Newport chemical business Solutia.

Mr Phillips said: "The standards in this competition continue to rise and this year's entries were very much better than last year's.

"However, none of the companies complied 100 per cent with the rules and we would urge the link teachers to study them. In particular, we would urge report writers not to rely on computer spell-checkers - they're not infallible and we noticed a lot of spelling and grammatical errors."