In general I learned to calculate finances ahead of time mainly because that’s what I was in charge of. In addition to that I learned from the Stitch group that packaging does in fact make a difference. I also learned from them that word of mouth is pretty strong and fast. I was surprised when I actually saw a person come up saying she was recommended the product by her colleges. As for things that were easy – nothing was. Some main difficult points would probably be figuring out the price of the product as well as lowering the costs of production. This was hard mainly because our product was so costly that it created negative profit to begin with unless we were to sell it for an outrageous price. Most of our sales came from acquaintances which is both kind of disappointing but at the same time was expected. That because said a customer that fit the profile of people we were trying to target bought a product. Although it was one person it showed that attempting to make our target audience clear payed off. As for things I would do differently along with doing finances ahead of time would simply be to do the rest of the planning ahead of time. This includes things like marketing, designs and even product testing.
Tag: week 4
January 27th was the day picked for us to sell our products. It was a new experience for me and it ended up revealing many things that I had not considered before but showed up during the sales period.
Our product, Amore Due, was available for pre-order only, with two prototypes on display for people to see and a poster advertising the product. Not having the physical product for sale at the moment was a disadvantage for us, since we had to expect costumers to rely on our prototypes and words only. I think many people were a little intimidated to approach us since we didn’t have much on display, and many were probably also intimidated by the idea of signing a list for pre-order sales, probably not ready for such commitment. Still, people approached our table and asked about the product, some of them showing genuine interest.
If we were to repeat the experience, I’d like to have a better plan of action that focused more on attracting customers, and maybe a few physical products all ready and available to be bought on real time. I think we could also have used more intensive marketing techniques, and, overal, acquainted people with our product better, since it’s a bit of a innovative idea and some people might be confused or hesitating towards it. It would be also interesting to consider approaching people on our own rather than expecting them to approach us.
An example of a successful business in the Maker Economy that comes to mind is Bullseye Beads shop on Etsy. This shop is specialized in selling hand-crafted accessories and jewellery that are incredibly aesthetically appealing and also have a very unique identity to themselves, such as glass acorn pendants, delicate necklaces and many others. Some might consider the products pricey, but the costs are directly proportional to the amount of time and work spent to craft each item. The amount of sales and positive reviews is enough to show this business is successful and effective on its sales strategy.
After the sales that executed at OCADU’s lobby, I learned a few things about sales. First off, it is very hard to break even with the amounts spent to produce the products. It took about a quarter of the cookies being sold to break even with the production costs. Without some sort of attraction, people simply walks past the tables or stares at what we are selling from a distance. Also, it was even more challenging to make sales because there was another table selling more varieties of baked goods right next to our table. They lowered their prices when we set our table up, which helped them gain more customers. The other bake sale my group faced was one competition that we did not account for, which possibly also lowered our number of customers. Overall, it was difficult to sell our products.
We sold our products successfully to people who saw our posts on Facebook and became interested in the cookies. Another method was Afonso selling cookies to his friends who stopped by the booth while we were selling. That worked because they were people he knew and wanted to support our trip. To do a better job next time, I would consider packaging the cookies nicely in little bags. I would also darken the icing colour to make the colours more vibrant and attractive. Our group definitely needed more advertising as well as the consideration of going to people and asking if they would like to buy cookies, rather than waiting for people to come to us. One factor that would help would be to not sell cookies when another bake sale is happening because with our tables side to side, customers assumed we were fundraising for the same reason.
A company with a successful strategy in the Maker’s Economy would be Erin Baker’s Wholesome Baked Goods. Erin Baker, the founder of this company, started the business by baking cookies herself. This maker’s economy is both interesting and successful because it is leaning towards something that most major food businesses do not tend for, which is healthy eating and lifestyle. Erin Baker spent her time creating the healthiest breakfast cookie for Americans who are too busy to eat breakfast. Her strategy targets most people in today’s working society, aside from the fact that all of the products are freshly baked by herself.
This Tuesday, class time was spent in the lobby of 100 McCaul selling our products. This was a huge learning experience and taught me much about the selling process. For example, I learned about the need to prepare for absolutely anything; selling was more difficult than predicted. A group of graduate students was selling baked good right next to us, and this made selling our cookies more difficult. One thing that was easy about selling our product was that we didn’t need to explain or justify it as they were cookies. This meant that if a customer approached the table out of interest, that they would not have needed to be convinced of the usefulness of our product; customers already knew exactly what was in front of them.
For the future, we will plan for the unexpected (i.e. another bake sale). Another improvement that can be made is in our advertising. We produced a great animation for sales day, and advertised through social media, but it seemed as though this was not enough to attract as many customers as we had wanted and will be improved upon in the future.