We looked at our market research that we gathered from our survey and astonishingly 20+ people had taken 2 minutes out of there spare time to fill in our survey, so obviously we were all like great! Lets get working on the boxes, we found a person on the internet who could sell us flat pack boxes about 4cm x 4cm x 4cm in size, for fairly cheap we were also buying in bulk so this knocked the price down a little bit, this was good news, because a group of us had spent the day wandering the streets of preston looking in all kinds of craft shops (Abakhan, Rymans and Staples, etc) trying to find small favor boxes, we found something exactly what we wanted in Rymans but they were to shiny, only came in one colour and to expensive. So we stuck to the person we had found on the internet, once we received the flat pack boxes in the post and had figured out how to assemble them, we spent a good few hours working as a team, one person assembles the lid, one person assembles the box one person puts sweets in the box, one person ties the ribbon on round the box (this was a complicated task) and one person puts the box into the big cardboard boxes we had ‘acquired’ and gets them ready for the sale, we had to arrange them into one side has a certain variety and the other side has the other variety, and label them so we didn’t forget.
So, we had 80 boxes made up with sweets and chocolates in, now it was time to go to our table in the Student Union and get selling our boxes, it was a pretty slow go to be honest, we weren’t located in the greatest part of the student union, we were upstairs in a place were few people walk passed, instead of downstairs were the stalls cant help but be noticed, infact during our sale time there was a lady selling freshly cooked pancakes, in view of the whole student union to make it better for her the day was cold and the pancakes were hot, smart thinkers like that are the kind of people we need on our team, anyways we though, ‘we’ve spent good money on these boxes lets get them shifted’ so a member from our team and a member from the group we were selling with went out to sell the boxes to passers by on the streets, this worked well because after they returned after each 20-30 minute journey round the campus they came back and had sold more each time round than we had done sitting at our table, after a few more journeys round campus we decided it was time to call it quits.
We looked over the stock and to our surprise, boxes which had chocolate containing nuts the exterior of the boxes topped off with a ribbon, sold a lot more than any other of the boxes, maybe a lot of people relate Christmas chocolates to nuts as part of a festive tradition. We had managed to sell over 50% of the boxes 43/80 boxes which made £43 in total which wasn't bad for a first run, easily breaking even and making an estimated profit of £20 if we were to do this again, i imagine we'd make up a similar amount of boxes all containing nut based chocolate or normal chocolate, sweets and Christmas don’t seem to match aswell as Christmas and chocolate. All the boxes would be wrapped with ribbon and probably look a little more fancier for a bit more cost, this would work out because we still break even and with a little bit more decoration we would of made a lot more money, from the experience of selling these boxes i guess we got a lot of feedback just from the remainder of stock we had left. I enjoyed doing this task even waking up early in the morning to be in time for my shift and I had even stayed through the whole day because it was entertaining, if I was to do it again I’d be more prepared and ask for a better table in a better spot, but I wouldn’t change the team (especially the people who actually turned up to meetings and the event.)
One quick little note, I actually do not know what happened to the rest of the stock, and there was a lot of sweets on the line there…
So we were asked to split into groups, and amongst are groups come up with an object which we could sell at the Christmas fair in the Student Union, preferably with a Christmas based theme to it, originally Me and Frankie joined a group we didn’t particularly want to work with, due to different interests, also, they were getting us to come up with all the ideas and do all the thinking. The ideas we came up with (to them weren’t good enough.) So me and my partner in crime Frankie got frustrated, so to solve this problem we migrated to another group and took our ideas with us. Our ideas involved selling T-shirts with a cartoon cupcake on and having them for all different age groups the older the age group the more sophisticated the t-shirt design was. In our new group they considered it as an idea and actually listened to our suggestions, but, after brainstorming lots of ideas together, including stuff like jewellery or Christmas wrapping paper/cards we, stumbled upon the idea of making small boxes (or favours) filled with sweets and chocolate, we came up with a range of different colour schemes (Christmas based colours like Red/Gold/Silver/Green) and we were each assigned to make a few designs each based around Christmas as an outer pattern on the boxes, make them look a bit more fancier and interesting, our next move was to figure out what kind of chocolates and sweets do we want to sell, do we put them in a little bag (inside the box) to make them more hygienic, do we have less nut based chocolate because of allergies or maybe less gelatin based sweets so we could get more sales from other cultures, in the end we came up with the idea of having a selection, some with nutty chocolate others without nutty chocolate, some all chocolate with no sweets and some more sweets and no chocolate, this seemed the best way to fit a variety of boxes so the customer has more of a choice, furthermore, we went into research, market research its not good enough just having what we think will sell (a variety of different sweet boxes) but what other people want from us the smartest way to go about this was a questionnaire, and the easiest way to get people to do a questionnaire is when there not busy and bored on facebook, so a member of the team razzed up a quick Poll on ‘Surverymonkey.com’ a handy website for building surveys and finding out statistics for the given poll.
