In the process of creating our product for the Christmas Market, we used almost all of the Design Thinking Strategies. At the start of the project, we used empathy to talk about what Christmas means for other people who have different beliefs and religions. In InnovateED, we split into groups and started to think about possible product ideas. We also interviewed some other students and asked them what they want for Christmas. We used the strategy Ideate to sketched and plan our product. We tested all of the possible outcomes, depending on how much we sell our product for, and what it looked like. We changed the price of our product and worked out the percentage markup, and if we weren’t making enough profit, we would raise the price and test again.

Although most aspects of this project were enjoyable, I did feel as if our group work and collaboration could be improved at some points. Because we had a large group, there were a lot of arguments because everyone had different opinions. Another part of this project I found challenging, was starting our business with only $30. We had a big set back when we were told that we had to pay full price for our glass jars because we didn’t have much money left and the glass jars were our best-looking product. In the end, all of our products look great but we spent the full $30, meaning that we only started making a profit at the market after we reached $30.

Overall the Christmas Market was an amazing experience, and I enjoyed it. It taught me new skills but the most important thing I learned is that when things don’t go as planned, you need to keep going and find a different solution. This skill is called resilience, and it was very important in this project because not everything went the right way.