The Christmas Market was an amazing experience that I would recommend to anyone. We learned all about economic concepts and also learned how to apply them into our product and our advertisement. It is also another opportunity to get closer to specific people that you wouldn’t really consider talking to otherwise. Another thing that we learned more about was our Capabilities. I think that I improved on them all however I will talk more about the capabilities that I feel I improved on the most later on in this reflection.

Product

Our idea for the product was originally hacky sacks however after we had looked at the cost it would take to get all of the materials was pretty low so we decided to create another product as well as the hacky sacks and this idea proved to help us as we sold out of the hacky sacks in the first fifteen minutes and we still had some of the other product to sell. The other product was extremely cheap to make as it was only $0.09 to create a bag of them. This product was the dog treat. At the end because we had made sixty of the dog treat bags we still had some left over so our group decided that we would still sell some to Astrid’s neighbourhood as she had already tested them on her neighbours and they said that they would buy them.

Cost

My group decided on how to price our products by using a few different methods. For starters we looked at how much it costs for all of the materials for both of our products. For our Hacky Sacks it cost $0.90 for all of the materials and for our dog treats it was $0.03 but we were selling three per bag so that was actually $0.09 for the dog treats. From there we knew that we would have to make profit from our products, so we decided that we would have to at least make a percentage mark-up of over 100% on each product. Our next step was asking some people around other classes what they would pay for the products. For the hacky sacks it averaged at about $3.00 so we thought that we would price it at $2.99 using a psychological trick to make them think that they are paying for less than $3.00 although they really aren’t. We did the same for dog treats and the majority of people said that they would pay $2.00 so that’s what we went with. As soon as the market had started the dog treats were a hit and we sold seven bags of them in the first two minutes and that was good and all but it got us thinking that we were maybe over pricing the hacky sacks and so we eventually had to change the price to $2.00 and it worked. We were sold out within minutes. This made our percentage mark-up for the hacky sacks 122% and 2122% for the dog treats. That to me proves that anything that the market won’t bear, won’t sell anything at all to any consumers.

Capabilities

In this project we used all of the capabilities however here are some of the main ones we used and also how we used them. The first one that I used was collaboration. I think that collaboration is a huge part of anything in life so getting the experience when we are at this age is amazing and also sticking with it throughout your years in high school will help you for the rest of your life. I think that I used collaboration the most because I was in a group of four. When we first got together we discussed our ideas and we decided on our product. As I said before it was a hacky sack. The next capability was creativity. For the Christmas Market we obviously had to come up with an idea for a product to sell. Our target audience was generally people in year 5 and year 6 so we decided to base our products with this information. Our hacky sacks are especially for younger users because my sister spent hours playing with our prototype hacky sack and she very much loved it. Also there are loads of people at the school who have dogs and that was our target audience for the dog treats so we sold well with those as well. The third Capability that I used most was organisation. We had to be organised every lesson or else we wouldn’t have completed our product in time. Each week I was in charge of remembering our products and everything we needed and to be honest it was quite stressful at times but In the end was very much so worth it. Also Organisation towards our actual Christmas market day was very important. We had to remember some Christmas decorations, our products and a table cloth. Those were only some of the things that we needed to remember for this experience.

What I Would do Differently Next Time

In my opinion there are many ways to do something and the way we made and produced our product was good however here are some of the things that I think would have helped us sell more. Hacky sacks were only being produced by one other group, so this product was in demand. This means that there weren’t a lot of them about so if you wanted one you would have to get it quickly or else you wouldn’t get one. My group didn’t really think in this way, so we didn’t produce as much of the product as possible. If we had have produced more of the hacky sacks, then at the end of the market we wouldn’t have as many people come up to us and ask if we had any left. Another thing that I would have done differently would be being able to choose our own groups. I know that some of the other classes go to do it with people of their choice and they said that it was more enjoyable, and you could rely on those people to get their work done because you trusted them more. The next thing that I would do differently is our cost. We completely sold out of one of our products and almost sold out of the other one so that tells us that we could probably have sold our items for more than what we did. I reckon that if we had have waited and not lowered our price for the hacky sacks then we could have sole them for more profit. Also, with the dog treats I think that we could have maybe raised the price a bit to $2.50 or possibly $2.99. One final thing that I would change is where our stall was placed. Our stall was supposed to be based closer to the centre of the market however another group stole our place so we had to take theirs and it was closer to the outside of the market so I feel like we could have maybe attracted more people if we were further inside the market or even closer the efpos.

Conclusion

This market was amazing in so many ways. In the way where I got to work with people that I would usually never work with. In the way that we got to learn about all the amazing things in economics. Even in the way we got to learn different strategies to try and sell our products. This market to me was an incredible opportunity and I was really glad to be a part in it.