What is the Christmas Market?
The Christmas Market is a project that we started at the beginning of Term 4. The Christmas Market was a wonderful experience for me and my group, Liam Howell and Barry Jelinek. This project is where many groups, just like ours create products to sell during a Friday Lunchtime.
What did we do before the market?
There were many stages that we had to complete before the market, including producing our products, Emoji Keys. However, before creating our products, there were still many steps to making this market successful as possible.
Firstly we had to learn about the many economical skills to make our business earn a profit at the Christmas Market. The most important of these skills that we needed to learn about in this is pricing, where there is 4 main different types of pricing. The first pricing strategy is cost plus margin, which every business must do if they wish to earn a profit. Cost plus margin is where businesses add a extra price on top of their cost price so they can earn a profit. Another pricing strategy is penetration pricing is when a business starts at a low price but then as more customers come they make the price higher. Premium pricing is a less common type of pricing for our market as it would be hard to establish your business as premium quality. The last type of pricing is psychological pricing which is where people try to convince people that a product or service is cheaper even though it may not be. For example, businesses might advertise their product at $3.99, when really it is the same as $4.00.
In our experience of the Christmas market, we mainly used two of these pricing strategies to gain the highest profit possible. We used pyschological pricing and cost plus margin. We started our price at $3.99 which we would earn a very high profit from as our cost price per unit was only $0.64.
After this stage we started to create ideas for our christmas market product and to get our idea accepted we need to pitch it successfully. Our first idea did not get accepted as it was not logical and was very time consuming to make. After a bit more thinking and research, we finally came up with the idea of emoji keys which are essentially just keychains with plush emojis made of felt. After this we gained our $30 investment to buy or materials for the cheapest price possible. We were able to buy all our materials for $26.30 which would make 40 products and 1 big emoji.
Soon it was finally the market, and we were eager to sell many products, hoping we would gain a profit. Fortunately, we gained a decent profit of $36, with total revenue of $96. Our big emoji also sold for $15, which we started getting bids for and was finally sold.
Overall, this experience was a great oppurtunity to learn about how real world businesses work, and the different strategies they use to gain the highest profit. It also taught us to become smart consumers, and the different strategies we could use the spend the least amount of money.