Throughout Semester 2 of Year 10 during Leadership and Innovation, we have been provided the opportunity to take part in a ‘side hustle’. The only requirements were that we pay back the money provided to us to take our business off the ground. The first steps to achieving this involves taking part in the designing phase including to identify personal passions, collaborate with others, form an idea, build and expand that idea before finally visualising it into a real life form.

Personal Passions

One of the best methods of creating a successful business is to do something that you actually enjoy. To discover areas that I enjoy and am passionate about, I used the Ikigai concept. Below is an image depicting my personal passions within the Ikigai model.

From this, our class discussed possible ideas that relates to multiple of these categories. Ideas I liked the most included ways to relax after water sports or an Aloe Vera soothing gel for sunburns.

Collaborating

After hearing the remaining of the class’s passions and interests, I found that both myself and Sunishka’s ideas were very similar. We collectively decided to work together for our side hustle. This provides multiple benefits including having another brain to help develop and extend ideas, extra hands to accomplish more work and providing the opportunity to continue expanding collaboration skills.

Ideas

Together our group went through a variety of different potential ideas including from focusing on products including sunburn relief and other Summer or sporty remedies to looking at more efficient ways of storing those products. We decided to follow the idea of some kind of pouch to hold essential sports equipment. From here, we formulated an inspiration board containing products that have already been made to see how we could make something better suited to our purpose. This is shown below.

Building and Expanding an Idea

This process of editing and refining our initial idea to a finalised product took many hours. We worked together to draw up and annotate new ideas, try different styles and experiment with varying uses. Below shows a couple of our sketches throughout this process.

Visualising the Product

Once we had created a shared understanding of what we wanted our product to look like, we began prototyping using paper. This allowed us to figure out the best most practical design with varying dimensions. Below shows a couple of the paper builds.

From here, we could make any final adjustments or changes as desired to leave us with this final product made out of scrap material.

Reaching the point of having a finalised prototype of our product for our side hustle marks the end of the designing phase. The next step from here will be the validation and feedback received from our target market, which will be discussed within the next post.