Every year our school has a Christmas market to raise money for the Salvation Army and the Year 7s have to create products. This year it was my turn!
In 2021 the Year 7 Christmas Market was so successful as a cohort we raised $1000 more than last years’ total. The total profit of the whole cohort was $3000. How exactly did we get such a large profit? Well it took a lot of planning, learning and capabilities to pull it off.
My group consisted of Samuel Arnold, Amelie Hall and I. Our product was handmade felt Christmas stockings and stars. To determine the cost of our product we did two things. We thought about the time and effort that went into creating the product and the price and amount of materials needed. We then divided the total price of the materials with the quantity of products created to get our pricing. Our original pricing was $5 for the stockings as they took the most time to make and used the most materials and $3 for the stars as they were quicker and cheaper to make.
During the market we noticed that not many people were buying our stockings. We realised that the consumers must have thought that the price was too high for them to afford. We then decided to lower the stockings price to $4 and when that happened we had more consumers buy our product.
If I was to go through the process of creating a market product again I would have created a product that was more targeted to people at our school as there wasn’t really a demand for our product. One problem was our ad. I think it could have been more creative and have used way more advertising strategies. Another problem was our stall location. We were right on the corner of the common facing outwards. To try and combat this problem we used big stall decorations like a table top Christmas tree to display our products and we used bright colours and wore costumes at our stall. Even though we had all of these decorations we didn’t make many sales. This could be due to the price of our product, having no packaging, a competitive market and there not being enough demand for our product.
Through this process I once again learned that capabilities are very important in group projects. The Capabilities that I developed in this project were organisation and effective communication. Organisation was a big factor of this project as if we weren’t organised with our budget or materials we wouldn’t be able to make our product at all. In this project I realised that budgeting is a real world skill and important to know for the future. Another important capability in this project was effective communication as we needed to make sure that we were meeting deadlines and were making progress when producing our product.
Overall the my Christmas Market experience was amazing! It was great to see the smile on peoples faces when they bought our products. I was privileged to have gone through this project as l learnt about how businesses run in the real world and developed capabilities that will help me now and in the future. I also want to thank my wonderful group members for their help in this project.