In term 4 of year 7, each student has the opportunity to raise money for the salvation army. We do this by creating sustainable and innovative products to sell at our Christmas market at the end of the term. In this process, we learnt how to be creative and innovative. We learn how to be successful entrepreneurs. The idea o this market is to give all students the experience of a real-life market. From this market, I learnt how to advertise and how a market works. I also learnt what criteria you need your products to be to sell them all.
My Market Experience
Before deciding on what product, I would create and sell at the Christmas market, I learnt how I would price products. From experience of the Skeleton Island Game, I knew that having a too cheap price could bite you back but having an expensive price will usually discourage customers to come to you.
When we decided on the products that we would sell at the Christmas market we were unsure of the price. Our products were cotton reusable bags with cute designs and woollen tassel keychains. Because each cotton bag cost $1 each, we knew we needed to make a profit from that. We also needed to include the factor of time and the paint. My team spent hours creating and painting our bags this we needed to cover the cost of our labour. Before the market, we decided that the cotton bags would be sold at $3.
Originally, we were only going to make 10 bags as this would be more manageable and we could spend more time on the designs. But we had many people saying they would be potential customers, so we learned that we had the money to make 5 more so we did. Doing this increase our profit.
The woollen tassel keychains cost very little to make. We purchased $4 worth of wool which intern created 40 keychains with lots of left-over wool. The metal ring of the key chains cost about 10c each because they were old from one of our team members. So, in total it cost about 20c per keychain including cost and labour. So, to make a profit we decide to sell our key chains for $1.
But our prices changed when we started the market. Our keychains stayed the same price. We noticed that we had some competition because there was another group selling tote bags for $7.00. Although they had hand-sewed their bags, which would increase the price we knew we could make some extra money if we increased the bag price to $4. Also, another reason for the price change was that we had multiple people come and say that the price was cheap. We were reading the market when changing the price.
Even when we increase the bag price we still sold out of bags in minutes. Showing that we still could have increased the price more because people were willing to pay. In total, we made $79.20 in profit.
Advertising:
Advertising was a learning journey for my group.
This was my group’s 2nd attempt at our print ad. The original one did not have our logo on it. The reason why we changed it was that we realised we did not include enough of the advertising techniques. We learnt how important it was to include a tag line explaining in a few sentences what our product is. Also, we added worlds that are Important when persuading people to buy our product.
During this Christmas market process, I used many of the capabilities. We were creative because we all had to create unique ideas for products to sell. I was collaborative Because we were collaborating in groups of 3. We used effective communication, organisation, resilience and we problem solved. This project forced us to use many of the capabilities. I learnt how to be very resilient because many things when wrong in my group including our main idea.
Next time:
Supply And Demand- If I was to create the same product I would consider supplying more. I noticed at the market that our product was sold very quickly. If we made more cotton bags and maybe less woollen tassel keychains, as the keychains we not as popular, we could have made more money. We also had many people come asking for a bag and we were sold out. Our supply was very short of bags but there was a lot of keychains. I would change the amount of each product we made.
Costs- I think that next time I would use more of my investment money to create more bags. Because it took longer for the keychains to sell this would be an improvement to my business. I had $30 and about $20 was used for the bags. So, I could have created about 5 more bags if I decrease the usage of the keychain materials.
Stall Location- My stall was located towards the side of the market. Although it was near the entrance for the year 5 and 6 students, I think that the was not the ideal location. If our stall was located more in the centre of the market, we would have sold our faster. I think this because from my experience of the past Christmas market I usually go straight to the stalls that are in the centre.
Packaging- The cotton bags did not require packaging, but the keychains did. To improve my sales, I think we could have used paper bags to package them instead of plastic. This would appeal to the customers that believe in sustainability. The downside of this change would be that you cannot see your product through the bags. I think the change would increase our sales.