We are to start up and run a small business and generate $100 in profit. Some of my business ideas are selling handmade journals and books that I make, selling decorations, candy, etc for upcoming holidays, selling jewelry and headbands, and doing photo shoots. My team has some pretty good ideas, but we aren't sure what we want to do.
Week 2
Our team is having difficulties settling on one idea. We all have good ideas, but everyone wants to do what they are good at, and we're all very different. For now we are going with the idea of flipping random items. So, we will be buying things online, from the DI, or other people in town and selling them for a higher price. The boys are pretty confident we can make a lot of money doing this but the girls aren't sure they will be good at it. I don't feel like it's really a business, but I'm willing to support my team and the idea.
Week 3
We had another meeting for our business and we decided that flipping stuff isn't the best idea for us. So now we are going to try out my idea of making and selling hand warmers. I don't think everyone loves the idea but we need to pick an idea and just go for it. Hand warmers are super easy and cheap to make and it's really cold outside so I think it would be a fairly successful business.
Week 4
We are really behind. No one in the team is passionate about the hand warmer idea. We're not sure if it's really going to be successful. It seems that everyone else thinks it's going to be too much work, and that no one will want to buy them, and we won't make enough money from them.
Week 5
We are super desperate to come up with a decent idea that everyone can be excited about. We had another meeting and we finally decided on selling chocolate covered strawberries, pretzels, and truffles. With Valentine's Day coming up soon, we feel that we can make our minimum of $100 in the next week. We made a website, Facebook page, and QR code. We came up with prices and figured out how much we would be making. We will have to sell a lot but we can sell our products for about 5 times the amount they cost, and it's still a really good deal that college kids can afford. Alex and I bought ingredients and tested out our recipes and figured out what works the best. We even went out to see if anyone would buy our products and we ended up making about $20! Makana and I found some great packaging supplies that will make our product look more professional. I took photos of all our products and put them on Facebook.
Week 6
We have officially started selling and it's going great! Our business is much more successful than we originally thought it would be. Since Valentine's Day is on Thursday we want to try to sell as much as we can before then. I ended up producing and selling our products for at least 15 hours this week. It's surprisingly exhausting work, but we've made about $200. Not everyone has been able to sell very much so we need to find ways to get everyone included and everyone helping out.
Week 7
We haven't sold very much this week. I sold the last of the truffles that I made last weekend. I think I've made about $30 just from my roommates! We need to get together and have everyone help out. We've only ever had 3 people working at the same time. It would be much easier to have 3 people making products and 3 people selling.