The Christmas market project began in Term 4 and all the year 7s including me were assigned a group to work on the project, I my group consisted of Ileri, Madhav, Mini and myself. The main purpose of this project was to teach us about economics and simulate a real-life example of a business.
Our product and ideas
over some period of time, we had got two main ideas for the products. Tic tac toe boards and can tab ornaments. We had also thought about making a checkers board however we did not have enough materials to create the checkers’ board.
Pitching our idea
after we had gained some plausible product ideas, the next step was to pitch our idea to Miss L. Our first pitch was unsuccessful, and we had to get rid of the spiral beads idea and change to tic tac toe boards. However, our second attempt was also unsuccessful and so on our 3rd and final attempt we had pitched our idea once more and we had passed with tic tac toe boards and can tab ornaments.
Creating the products
This process was rather tricky as we had to find a wood source. As a solution to this problem and to speed up this process we had split up to focus on different products. Ileri, Madhav and I was working on the tic tac toe boards and Mini was working on the can tab ornaments. Most of our materials were either free or cheap which meant we could make a lot of products in a short amount of time.
Deciding the cost
We decided to decide our price using cost plus margin. Cost plus margin basically means the cost to make the product plus the amount of labour we had put in to make the product. So, the original price for the can tab ornaments was $6 and the tic tac toe boards was $4. However, during the Christmas market we had changed it to $4 for the can tab ornaments then to $3. However, we didn’t change the price for the tic tac toe boards. IN the end we had sold all of our products.
Christmas market day
The Christmas market was a fun experience, although we were a bit concerned as we were not sure if we would get any sales because we had a very slow start to the market, however in the end we had enjoyed the experience as we were learning simple trading with friends plus this is my first experience with any type of market concept. Recap of the day: In the first part of the day, we had started moving the desks and items out onto the veranda near the common, then during lunch the sales, and at the end we had summed up the total amount of money we had made, which was around 87 dollars.
what could have been better
Although we had a fun time, what could have been better is the location of our stall. This is because our stall was rather close to the end of the common which meant that a lot of people had already spent their money on other stalls when they had arrived at our stall. This does not benefit us as we wouldn’t get as many sales as we could have meant that the $87 could have been bumped up to 90 or 100 dollars.