For InnovatED this term, the year 7’s held a Christmas market. We first started by going into our camp groups and asked questions like “What does Christmas mean to you?” and “What makes a good gift?”. We also brainstormed different gift ideas for kids our age, teens and kids.
In week 3, we got into our group and researched different products that we could sell. We had a few ideas such as keychains, coasters, bulbuls. Then we landed on the idea of tie-dye socks. We all really liked the idea so we instantly researched the products we needed to make the socks. Miss L then said in order to start creating the products we would need to make a pitch. Our pitch was a PowerPoint including a spreadsheet chart and a before and after of our socks. We even had our own little speeches to say our pitch while the powerpoint was being played.
When determining the price our product (tie dye socks) we had to think of factors we learnt beforehand. One example of these factors was the skeleton island game. In this game we were given an amount of money, then we had to bargain to the suppliers, for the items we needed to survive on the island. Another factor we included when determining what the price was, is how work intensive it was to dye the socks. Dying the socks was very tricky as we had to use the method of trial and error to understand how to make the socks as best as we could. We ended up re-dyeing them about 5 times. In the middle of an InnovatED lesson, we found another group was also selling tie-dye socks. This made it tricky as we wanted more people to come to our stall instead of theirs, so obviously we wanted our prices cheaper and more appealing. Our original selling price for a pair of socks was $5.00, but as we didn’t want to take the risk of more people visiting their stall, we lowered our price. Our group determined the cost of our socks to be $4.00 (or as we showed at the stall, $3.99). The original cost of the socks we bought were $4 for 5 pairs which comes down to 80c per pair of socks. We bought 3 packs of socks (15 pairs of socks in total, costing us $12 of our $30 investment money). Therefore, our profit per sock sold would be $3.20. We managed to sell all 15 pairs which means we made $48 profit money.
If I were to do this again, there are a few things I would change. I think our group needed to have more of a target audience instead of just the year 5’s and 6’s being our target audience. Other groups I noticed created a product leaning towards one gender. For example, some products being sold were earrings, jewellery holders or bracelets. And some groups’ target audience were people with pets or siblings, as some groups made dog treats or toys. Our product again was tie dye socks and we found that a lot of different people with different ages and different preferences came up to our stall. If we had a more specific target audience, we might have created a different product and had more people come to our stall. I think our stall location was pretty good although it would’ve been better to be placed near the entrance. I think this because I noticed that many people who came to our stall stated that they had already seen our competitors. This means that people saw their stall before ours and as they were placed near the entrance, it makes sense. Other than those two things, I think our packaging and prices were great as you could clearly see the colour of the socks and when we told people our prices, no one looked shocked, and we even had a couple people say that our prices were more reasonable than our competitors.