What we did (process)?
We all noticed that there was a lot of litter around the school and the community which made the community look messy. Most of this rubbish was plastic wrap that kids would have in their lunch box to wrap food. We wanted to do anything we could to stop this which brought us to make beeswax wraps, which is a substitute for plastic wrap. The first thing we did to get this business up and running was to make a prototype of the beeswax wraps. This took a lot longer than we expected as we needed to get the quantities right and we needed to test all different beeswax to see which was the highest quality. The first method we did was to iron the beeswax onto the fabric. Although this worked, we found that there was clumps of beeswax on some of the larger sizes as the iron can’t reach the corners. We didn’t want to sell faulty products, so we decided to try the oven version. This worked a lot better as we made them faster and they were better quality.
What have we learnt?
At the start of this journey, we were doing all the work during the innovated sessions which is once a week. We very quickly realised that we would have to do some of it in our own time. We started to make beeswax wraps in our own time which made us feel much more prepared and confident in our business. We have also learnt what type of fabrics we need to make the best products, for example, when the fabrics were predominantly white, they would get discoloured and stained with the beeswax. This is not the standard of products that we would like to sell. So, we experimented with different colours to see our best outcomes.
What capabilities we developed?
We learnt how important teamwork is when owning a group business. The times where this has been important is when we are coming close to the market date it is so important that everybody is doing their fair share so that we are ready. We also learnt how important problem solving is. This is because of course when starting up a new business not everything is going to go to plan and things will go wrong. It is important to overcome these things and move on.
