Pre-Sale event in Management Building
Posted: December 3, 2014 Filed under: Field Y2, Year 2 | Tags: add, art, branding, building, business, candy, canes, cards, cash, company, customers, cut, decor, design, exchange, flow, fun, gingerbread, incentives, interactive, job, logo, man, management, matchmakers, money, one, ons, out, paper, pencils, pre, prepare, reindeer, sale, selling, service, snow, sold, team, top, trail, tree, uniform, work, wwbd Leave a comment
Today we had our pre-sale of our handcrafted cards in the Management Building at Llandaff. We were their from 10-2 and felt it was a great experience to have before our official stall on the 16th December at the CSAD building. Today we had to make some quick adjustments to our plan as screen-printing went haywire last night meaning that we could not create our final cards and so instead we created digitally printed cards to display at our stall while we took pre-orders for the 16th. To attract customers we lowered our price to those who pre-ordered by 25% to encourage them to buy now rather than later, this gave us a rough estimate of how much we can expect to create, which in turn saves us time and money with any extra cards. We started the stall by interacting with the cards ourselves, cutting and colouring in our designs for display. Students came over to see what we were doing and some were watching from the floors above. Once we completed a small sample we put them on display next to the cards as an example.
As expected, the target market did not suit our location as we were surrounded by students not children. However the tutors and a few students bought the bundled cards and as an incentive we gave them each a free candy cane for pre-ordering. What surprised me was that a student and a tutor came to us after their friends told them about our items. I felt the pre-sale went very well even though the market audience was not really suitable. At 2pm we packed up and headed over to the print studio to put a fresh coat on our screen-print ready for friday/early next weeks print session. We are hoping to have thicker card by the end of the week and also ribbon to secure our bundles together and candy cane packages. What would also be interesting is to create a set of new designs for a student target audience to sell on the 16th as this will give us a better chance at connecting to our peers and maximise revenue. Our envelopes are expected Monday-Wednesday next week and so we can not secure the packages just yet.
Next on the list is to make a start on the Business plan which is up to 3000words and has to be completed within the next 2 weeks. We also need to collect any outstanding payments for the pre-order which were made online through our Facebook page, this will be done by the end of the week.
Mind Your Own Business; Session 5
Posted: December 3, 2014 Filed under: Field Y2, Year 2 | Tags: art, back, bagc, business, card, cards, cocker, collaboration, company, decor, designs, digital, dizzyjam, enterprise, error, fayre, finance, guest, guillotine, market, mistake, money, neil, online, plan, pre, presentation, print, printing, production, reciepts, sale, screen, speaker, start, team, tree, unforseen, up, xmas Leave a commentOn Monday we went to the library to print off our finalised designs an
d make necessary changes. I finished the business cards which also double up as receipts. At the library we had a few issues with the printing due to our designs being resized by the printer settings which made us print more copies off which could of been avoided. However the cost of this was nothing major and has all been noted in the finance section of our business for review later. When I got home I found that the candy canes, cello card bags and pencils had arrived on time which meant that we were ready to start packaging our product on Tuesday. This boosted our excitement to move on and create our cards ready to be sold on Wednesdays pre-sale. We stayed in uni till 5 preparing the screen printing equipment for Tuesdays session.
On Tuesday we came in for 10 and had a presentation from a guest speaker called Sarah Mccall from ONGL Design and Make, she was a student at Cardiff met until 2009. She started up her own studio after working for other businesses.
Go Wales Freelancer Academy helped her out by providing a course on enterprise and jargon.
Top tips:
Be knowledgable in your product. Make them feel that they need this product. The more active you become online, the more you project yourself
“Only a poet that risks is free” Reflect an react
Then a
t 2pm we had a talk from Neil Cocker, owner of an online company called DizzyJam. He was a great guest speaker and told us about his experience of running a company and his thoughts on revenue margin in comparison to size of company which made me think differently about scale of a company as a small-time company could be making the same profit as a multi-million pound company which has high production costs. After the presentation we split the team in half, the girls went to the screen printing room to work on the stencil for print while me and Barbra went to the library to print off posters and finance receipts. When the group met back later on we discovered that the screen-printing was over exposed and so the lines were not correctly set. This meant we had to wash out the stencil and start again. We worked into the evening and past 5pm which risked us being kicked out by security, at 7pm we scrambled to our backup plan of digitally creating our products for the display of Wednesdays pre-sale. We decided this was the safest option and it would at least give us something to show our customers what they would be buying. We printed 2 copies of each of our designs and a selection of business cards which we cut out using the guillotine. We began to package our cello bags with our prototype cards, pencils and candy canes ready for Wednesday morning.
Ben Walton 
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