Mind Your Own Business Review

My favourite part of second year so far has been the first half of the Field module which ran from October through to December. I collaborated within a group of 4 members and made some great friends from it. We worked together to create a marketing product to sell to other students which would be potential customers outside of university. We brain stormed and combined all of our ideas to create an ideal product. We decided to opt for xmas cards as the market would be just before christmas. This was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the holiday period. We each created a few designs each and then reviewed them all and selected the best marketing designs. We wanted these cards to stand out from its competitors and so we wanted to create traditional cards using the machinery available to us within university. We letter pressed greeting messages within the cards and screen printed each of our designs onto the cards. Our material was carefully sourced from online, I was in charge of the finance and so I researched quality card for money and found packs of 100 A4 sheets at 300GSM which meant that our screen printing wouldn’t bleed and thus keeping our designs crisp and to a high quality.

We wanted our product to become more than just a card, and so after some thought and discussion we adapted our product to be customised through colouring. We bought a large amount of colouring pencils and created our own schematic box with our logo and message on before putting the packaging together. Our packaging was made with high accuracy and left no room for error after a lot of digital scrutiny before production as we did not want to waste money on misprints.

We packaged our cards within a polythene bag and added an additional ribbon with our brand logo with its personal message to the customer thanking them of their service. We successfully sold all of our products and made a 300% return which we felt proved our product was well-suited for our target audience. After the market we went straight to work and focused on getting our Business plan together for our Pitch in the coming weeks. The Pitch came around quickly and despite being nervous I felt that together we did a fantastic pitch and clearly explained our product. The feedback confirmed this and they commented on the group answering their set-questions in the pitch before they had a chance to ask us at the end.

After Christmas we regrouped and received our feedback for the first half of Field. We received over 80% giving us a clear first which has inspired me to think about creating a small business after university, I would really like to manage my own business and feel that I am financially knowledgable enough to resource materials and maintain a cash flow. From this project I have seen how easy it is to create a product and market yourself from just £100 with the resources available to me right now.