In Semester 1 InnovatED, I chose $20 boss as my selective. $20 Boss is a program where individuals or groups can create a product/s to sell at an upcoming market and each student (not group) is given a $20 loan to start their business.
During the process of us creating our products, we faced many problems but we were able to overcome them using many different ways. But at the end of the day, we were still able to overcome these challenges. This gave us a amazing chance to experience real life marketing and business. We had to use the different marking strategies and skills to determine the prices and to persuade those around us to perhaps consider purchasing our products.
Our Process
Our group consisted of 3 people: Andrew, Marcus and Maxwell, therefore at the start of the semester we were given $60 loan to start off with. Our product idea was to laser cut bag ornaments, using designs created from Adobe Illustrator our selves then laser cutting them onto plywood. Unfortunately, we realized that if we were to only sell bag ornaments, our market and target audience wouldn’t be as wide, therefore we had also decided to make them into bag ornaments/key chains. The change would not use up a lot of time as we only had to slightly change the margins and size of the designs. We had to go through 4 periods of prototyping with trial and error. In this process we had many errors due for example, laser cutting failures and file corruptions. After creating our first dozen prototypes of wooden keychains/ bag ornaments, we had finally gotten a clear idea and started creating them in large amounts. During this process, our group was able to come up with new designs and even think of custom made ones. Fortunately, just a few day we had thought of this idea, one of our group members Marcus was able to pull some customers already. Having the ability to order custom made keychains made a huge difference and it turned out to be a banger.
After our idea of using custom made designs was found successful by many of our peers. We decided to shift our focus onto creating and completing custom made designs for the next few weeks. After we created the custom pre-orders, we shifted our focus back to laser cutting the wooden keychains. In the end, we were able to laser cut around 200 wooden keychains.
Prices
For the custom pre-ordered keychains/ bag ornaments, the prices ranged from $5-10. For the original wooden keychains on the day, we sold them for $4 for one and 3 for $10. We managed to earn around $100 on the market day excluding the pre-orders, and earnt around $200 from the pre-orders.
Capabilities
Two of the major capabilities we used during this $20 Boss process were communication, collaboration, organisation and resilience.
Communication: Our group had great communication and we always talked things out as a group such as the prices, designs, colors and advertising. Communication is essential in a business, in order to understand each other and to understand our roles etc.
Resilience: Our group was resilient when we realized that our market and target audience wasn’t large enough and had to also add key chains to our idea.
Overall, this experience had been a fun and I have learnt many things from it. I will definitely treasure this opportunity. This was an amazing opportunity to earn some early money using our skills and working together.