The Christmas Market was an annual project year sevens did as part of HASS, English and InnovatED. In class we played the game skeleton island to teach us about one of the HASS concepts, supply and demand. There were many extra hours put into this so that our finished products would look professional and polished. As a cohort, we were required to make and design products for students and teachers to buy. We drew on many different skills we had accumulated from this year such as the ASC Capabilities Chart and Design Thinking Process. Every group in year 7 was given a $30 business loan and we had 6 weeks to come up with our finished products. Syd and I worked together and made Shower Steamers to sell.
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To begin with, we used empathy to understand what people wanted for Christmas and what they could get for there family and friends. This allowed us to come up with ideas on what we could make. We used ideate to come up with many different ideas on what we could sell. We brainstormed 20 ideas in 20 minutes to start being creative with all our ideas. Once we had finalised what our product would be we started prototyping to pitch to Ms Shaw what our idea was. After we pitched our product and it got approved, we tested our product and continued to make even more stock.
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In my Christmas market experience I experienced quite a few of the business concepts. Syd and I experienced scarcity, making choices and allocation and markets. Scarcity – Scarcity was experienced when towards the end of the market our resources/products became very limited and with many people wanting to buy our sold out items. Making choices – We experienced this business concept with our consumers because for one consumer we sold 4 shower steamers for $11 instead of $12. Although we sold this for a lower price we made this choice so that we would make a higher profit that just selling 3 shower steamers to the consumer. We already had a huge markup from our cost price so this decision allowed our customer to be extremely satisfied. We also experienced this when we decided not to drop our price of our product in the end of the market. We did this because we felt that we would still be able to make enough of a profit and sell enough of our products. Allocation and markets – The allocation of our products were very important in this market, our target audience was to sell and promote more towards teachers and junior school student. This was because they would probably spend more money than others. Junior school students may be more impulsive and teachers would have more money to spend
In the Christmas market, we were producers that made goods for others to consume. As producers we were trying to attract many different types of consumers. For this market one of the most important consumers for us were impulsive consumers. These were consumers who would make less calculated decisions on spending money. There were also discount consumers that we could attract if we decided to lower the prices of our products.
We could have improved and thought about more environmentally friendly packaging. This was because we used cellophane to wrap our products so that people could still see them. The problem was that it wasn’t eco-friendly and we could have found other alternatives for packaging.
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I really enjoyed the Christmas market experience as we worked on making and prototyping our products over a few weeks. Nearing the date of the Christmas market our excitement was reaching a high as we completed the finishing touches. We made a total of $127.7 with a 552% markup from the Christmas market. Overall, I feel like I learnt lots about producers, consumers and business concepts from this market and I feel like we went really well for our overall end product.