During her time on the KEDGE campus in Bordeaux, Malika Coco-Viloin spent over a year in the merchandising department at Unilever. During her studies, she also did a university exchange at the TEC de Monterrey campus Estado de México.

Following her university exchange and graduation in 2006, Coco-Viloin began her international career, again in México, by joining the Délégation Générale du Québec. Following this experience, she embarked on an entrepreneurial career in México, founding a boutique selling organic French beauty products.

In 2011, she returned to Guadeloupe and became Brand Manager for Energizer and KCC in the consumer goods sector. In 2021, she was appointed Sales Manager at Safo in Martinique (food retailing group Master franchise Carrefour in the West Indies).

Since 2021, Malika Coco-Viloin has been Marketing Director and member of the Figedis Développement comex.

Hello, I'm originally from the West Indies and I joined KEDGE after 2 years of preparatory classes. During the oral interviews, I was won over by the kindness and support of the eligible students.

From my point of view, the strong points of the course are multiple:

• The flexibility of the school , which allowed me to do a year's work-study in 2003, when work-study was not yet a widespread part of the business school curriculum. In fact, it was this experience that helped me discover and fall in love with mass retailing.
• A rich community life. At KEDGE, I was a member of the Horizon humanitarian association, and took part in a number of one-off and long-term local initiatives, such as tutoring underprivileged pupils and food bank collections.
• The quality of the teaching and the lecturers: I particularly remember a lecturer, a sales manager from Xérox, who spoke on sales techniques: inspiring!
• Finally, the city of Bordeaux also has a certain charm. Coming from Guadeloupe, I was able to get back to the sea!

My best memory is probably the pro-team project I worked on for a year with my classmates. We collected books and funds for a rural school in Haiti. This project, which required a lot of personal investment, brought together four different profiles driven by the same ambition: the desire to make a difference to the schooling of the children there.

Three points stand out for me:

• I appreciated the strong links with companies throughout the course. The notion of rigor, in particular respecting deadlines, is also very important to me and I was very aware of this during my time at KEDGE.
• Results orientation is a key concept at KEDGE. The results focus is my common thread.
• Teamwork is particularly emphasized during training - team player is a strong value of the school.

Since 2021, I have joined Figédis Développement as Marketing Director and member of the Comex. I'm delighted to be working with this ambitious, innovative group that is a leader in our markets. I'm in line with my group's values: rigor, professionalism and honesty.

I'm committed to the company's development strategy, and I'm delighted to be making my contribution to a group that's expanding in the Caribbean and also in mainland France, in both French and English. As Marketing Director, I steer the marketing strategy for the whole group. I'm proud to have introduced and shared the CSR approach with the teams.

Pursue the digitalization of the group and meet the demand for e-commerce from consumers in the Caribbean, develop my group's business and share my values with all employees.

Dare to be bold! Believe in yourself and your dreams! Find your passion: the job that makes you want to get up every morning and excel.