The Christmas Market was a marketing event that all the Year 7’s were apart of. We got into groups of 2-3 and got started. First we came up of ideas of our potential products we could sell in the event. Then we made our description of our idea. My group’s idea was Painted Tote Bags, our targeted audience was students in Year 6-7, we chose this product because it was realistic, as in it was reusable and strong and sustainable for the planet. Then once we had a final product to sell, we made a pitch to convince the InnovateED teachers to give us our loan money which was $30. We included our product budget that included our product goods, the cost of the items, the quantity of the materials, the place we bought them from and the total cost which came down to $29.60. Some of our subjects like English, Digital Tech and Humanities had a part in how we did our selling. In Humanities we learned about the economy and the different ways we could sell our products. In English we learned about how the different advertising techniques we could use in our posters, while in Digi Tech we learned how to use Excel to budget our profit and loss.
1. How did that go?
I learned about entrepreneuring, budgeting, the economy and the ups and downs of a business ideas. I have learned from this experience that businesses require a lot of risk, they need to plan ahead for unlucky situations and calculate the likeliness of their product(s) selling. This experience has improved my experience in pricing techniques like premium and psychological schemes, it has taught me about budgeting, management and service. The most interesting thing that happened during this Christmas Market period was definetely making the tote bags, the least interesting part was the budgeting for the materials. I guess I could learn new things I’m not interested in by focusing on the good parts and the nice result it would give out in the end, which it did. The parts that were clear in this project was our idea and the amount of product we would create, but the parts that were confusing were definetly the budgeting and the improv that came with it. The parts that were in the middle were the setting up the stalls and decorations to make our stall attractive.
2. What seems most important about what was learned?
The things that seemed less important were the price tags because we already new the prices, but the most important parts were the item codes, the amount of money we would sell them for, the fact that we had to pay back the loan and hopefully make profit. After this experience the things I thought that were important like making a lot of profit seemed to not be because the teachers even told us that the teams that didn’t make a profit had a proper understanding of how important it was to actually sell your products.
3. What should I do with what I’ve learned and how should I respond to what I didn’t learn?
I am going to use this experience and knowledge that I got from the Christmas Market to do more selling events at the school in the future because I quite enjoyed being able to make people happy with my products and making a good profit out of them. Now if I make another business I have a better idea of what I need to do. I will respond to what I didn’t quite learn like the best selling techniques or what my stall should have looked like or how I should have interacted with the customers by researching more about entrepreneuring.
4. Based on what we learned today, what might we learn tomorrow?
What I’ve learned is seeming to head to me doing more market events at school in the future. If I were to go through the process of creating a market product again, I would do some more product research so I could see more products that were appealing and trending to the main consumers of this generation, I would investigate having more quality producer goods to make our products better and improved, making it easier to sell them at higher prices like the Hat Co producers who made their products expensive but because they were really good quality, they sold out in considerable time. I would also make similar changes to the amount of product I had to sell to create more consumer demand like the Hat Co producers because they didn’t have a lot of hats by the time late consumers came and they went to our stall to look for a product to buy of similar value. One important factors of production I would include would be to make our stall a bit more welcoming and attractive so more consumers would come and buy our products because the products we were selling didn’t let us have any space for decorations and because of late notice of decorations, me and one of my co sellers didn’t have anything to dress up in to appeal to customers. I would also add opportunity cost in there like I did the first time by making all the designs of the products differently whether they were hats, shirts, mugs, accessories or tote bags so that consumers could have opportunity costs. This happened in our Christmas Market because consumers that decided to go away, buy something else and come back later would find out that the bag that they wanted to purchase had already been taken thanks to consumer demand.
5. How have I been changed by what I’ve learned?
I feel quite optomistic of what I have done in the Christmas Market. I am definetely interested in learning more of the business-selling industry. In 40 days, weeks, months or years I would think of this experience as the first real business project that I participated in and got profit from.
The Christmas Market….
Thank you for reading! : )