Christmas Market reflection

Introduction

During the Christmas markets I have learnt a lot of things about economics such as lowering prices one cent lower then the actual price is better and more eye catching then the original price, interacting and being sociable with your customers is better than standing there and hoping that they will buy your products.

The beginning

In the first stage Aditya and I were unsure on what to make, our first idea was to make stickers but we were unsuccessful. Then we had the brilliant idea of a tangram. We got straight to work completing our prototype in one day, The next day at school we carefully experimented with others in the room of what price they would buy our products for, the average answer was $6. We decided to originally sell the tangram for that price until our next humanities lesson where Mr. Wong told how to hook customers with a price that looks cheaper but really isn’t. We dropped our price by one cent making our product look cheaper and more eye-catching. We were very happy with our choice at this point

The build

We had all the paints saws and basses to build the amount of 13 tangrams, so we got to work. Our first product was a bit rusty on the edges and low quality overall but we resolved this problem with sandpaper, it was the perfect solution, our product went from low to high. We then realized that you can make different variations with the tangram and thought about our display and how we could advertise it on the day. By Monday week 6 we just needed to paint one more tangram and we had finished. We were then able to work on our poster.

Poster

We needed to create a poster to advertise people around the school pre-market. We thought of something like endless possibilities or even the most curious have failed. We ended up going with a picture of curious George saying even the most curious have failed. Showing that you can be the one that solves our puzzle. We added a little light bulb around his head and the poster was ready to go.

Wrapping tablecloth and advertising

We needed to wrap our products, so we thought a nice Christmas themed wrapping would work, we needed a table cloth that would stand out so we got a bright coloured cloth that would easily be spotted from a long distance away and for advertising we put some tangrams on the table in a cat shape to show what you can create, we also let the people experiment it before they bought it.

The market

We were nervous at first that we would not make profit but we decided to go with the flow anyway, many customers walked buy not intrigued by our product until the math department showed up, they were willing to sell us out. We thought about for a while, if we went with the safe option we would barley make profit but if we chose not to then we would be risking not making profit for a lot more money, our ultimate decision was to got with the math department. We don’t know what would have happened if we decided not to sell out to the math department but we are glad that we played it safe.

Spreadsheet

We were required to make a spreadsheet showing our total revenue and profit. We managed to sell all of our products so we made products.

Conclusion

I enjoyed the markets and want to do more of this in the future, I thought the experiment made kids that about stuff that will help them a lot with economics in the future and that the school should keep going with this idea.