selling our cards

Today we finally sold our cards in the SU! It was a good day, although there weren't that many customers passing through. However, we sold most of our stock (some groups sold only one or two items in total) so I think we did quite well on that front. I don't know why we sold well, maybe our business idea just worked well and appealed to the students who came through? Ric (our group) and Aaysha (another group) were really proactive and went to the buildings in the area selling our products on the move, which undoubtedly helped our sales! Overall it was a good day, although everyone has agreed that perhaps the location wasn't the best, since there weren't too many people passing through. Maybe next time we should choose a different location to sell from.

Group Development

Today we also worked on our group development, answering some of the questions laid out to us at the start of this brief.

1. Decide on your company name.
Coming up with a name consisted of us sitting down and thinking about what it was we were a) trying to sell b) the message we were trying to get across with our product. Thinking about how our cards are going to have a more traditional and vintage style, combined with Helen's suggestions about using the old printing presses to emboss lace into cards to make nice patterns we came up with the name Vintage Press. I think this name is very suitable as you can get a basic idea of what it is we do without having to be told about our product and aims, and it also sounds classy and sophisticated, something we hope to achieve within our designs. For these reasons I think our name is perfect, and does not need to be worked on.

2. What is your mission? What are you aims? Objectives?
Our mission is to bring an essence of tradition and quality back into Christmas cards. When you look at the Christmas cards on offer today, many are bright and garish, using cheap materials and naff designs. Combining our graphic design, illustration and textile backgrounds as a group we can combine our skills and create a range of cards that are traditionally elegant and beautiful, without being too expensive, since our target market is students. We will use more classic Christmas colours (cream, gold and silver) and motifs (snowflakes and Christmas trees) than their more common (and in my opinion, tasteless) counterparts - green, red and white, tacky Santas, cartoon reindeer etc. We will aim to have between 4 and 6 different designs (there are 6 members in our group) which will 'work' well together as a set. Depending on the final size of the cards we may may custom envelopes to go with them, or simply buy them. Our current card sale price estimate is between £1 and £1.50, although we will make a more concrete decision once we have calculated what our materials will cost. Our cards will be sold on their own, as well as part of deals such as Buy 2 get 3rd free or 6 for £5 etc.

3. Sort out your strategy...
a) Where do you want to go?
We want to have a range of cards designed and manufactured, ready for sale by early December.
b) How are you going to get there?
Members of the team shall now go and draw up some potential designs to share with the rest of the group next week. If everyone comes up with at least 1 design then we should have 6 designs to work with.

4. Decide what you are goint to offer for sale - in terms of either a service or a product
Previously covered.

5. Carry out a SWOT analysis

Strengths

• Unique item
• Easy to manufacture
• Well skilled group (different creative backgrounds)
• Hand crafted appeal
• Low manufacturing costs
• Product has no impact on environment (all aspects are easily recyclable)

Weaknesses

• Christmas cards is an already saturated market
• There are plenty of cheaper alternatives to what we are offering

Opportunities

• Unique market (just selling to student and lecturers, not the general public)
• Location and low price of items has a good appeal to students (more likely to end in a sale)

Threats

• Current economic climate means people may not be willing to spend money on our products
• Could be limited by the amount of potential customers given our location

6. Carry out a PESTEL analysis

Political

• Preston has a large multicultural student presence, there may be students who do not celebrate Christmas who have no interest in our cards.

Economic

• In this economic climate people are tending to spend less and less money on items. With products such as Christmas cards you can easily buy very cheap ones from poundshops etc. and there is a possibility that potential customers will realise that they can buy Christmas cards for much less than we are selling our designs for, even though our designs are likely to be much nicer than the cheaper ones.
• This project brief only works because we are aiming to sell our products shortly before the Christmas break. If something were to happen and we had to postpone until after Christmas we would have to redesign our entire product since people would not be interested in buying Christmas cards in January.

Social

• -

Technological

• Since our designs will all be hand made there is little concern for technological assessment

Environmental

• We will try to source as much recycled/partiall recycled materials as we can for this project. In addition, our products will be entirely recyclable, so that our impact on the environment is minimal.

Legislation

• -
  

Market Research

Today we collected our market research results from the questionnaires we sent on Facebook and SurveyMonkey. The results are as follows:

Question: Where do you usually purchase greetings cards?

Answer: High street shops or the supermarket

How does this benefit our research?
Since it has been predecided that we will be selling our cards on campus from a stall and not in a supermarket or high street shop, I think this question needn't have really been asked. It gives us no indication of what we should do in regards to the design of the card, the price we should sell it at, or anything. I feel we have gained nothing by asking this question.


Question: How much would you spend on a Christmas card?

Answer: £1 - £1.50

How does this benefit our research?
If we know how much the average person spends on a Christmas card, then we can base the prices of our cards around this. I feel this question has benefited us greatly, since when we discussed how much we anticipated students would be willing to spend on a card we put the estimate at 50p - £1, but the average from our questionnaire is much higher. This means we can use a higher quality of materials when using our cards, to make them to a higher standard without risking losing money in the manufacture, since can sell them for more money at the stall.


Question: What makes you buy a card?

Answer: Mixed results

1. Price - Results showed very important
2. Message - Results showed indifference
3. Image/Design - Results showed very important
4. Brand (e.g. Marks & Spencers) - Results showed indifference
5. Charity - Results showed quite important


How does this benefit our research?
By seeing what aspects of a card are more (or less) important to a potential customer when they are deciding what card to buy (or not to buy) we can ensure that we are focusing on the right areas to ensure a successful product. This particular question is vital to our research and has provided us with very useful information.

Price - Very important
We shall be certain to price our cards at a reasonable and fair price, and given our research we know what price range we shall be aiming for.

Design - Very important
Although it might seem obvious that the design of the card is what is going to attract a customer, our research has backed up this thought and we know just how important the design of the cards is - although as creative students I feel it is in our nature to design something attractive anyway, so this was never going to be an issue.

Charity - Quite important
It seemed that people would be more willing to buy a card if it stated that the profits were going to charity, even if that meant parting with slightly more money. With even supermarket own brands now sell cards with the profits going to various charities it is easy to understand why people would rather buy charity cards. However, this works in our favour as part of this brief stated that any profit we makes will go to charity (which has yet to be decided). I think if we advertise this fact then our selling could be more successful than if we weren't to mention it.

Message - Not important
Since our research has shown that people are not interested in the message in their cards we have decided to leave our cards blank. Not only does this save us researching and coming up with suitable phrases to print inside the cards, but it means the customer can 'customise' their card for whatever purpose.

Brand - Not important
This is another question that I don't feel needed to be asked. Since we are not designing a range of cards for a specific company, whether or not people are attracted by brand names is irrelevant. However, the research showed that people showed indifference as to the brand of the cards they were buying so this should not have a bad effect on our sales (i.e. people won't buy our cards because they're not branded).


Question: Would you be more likely to buy a 'charity card'?

Answer: Yes

How does this benefit our research?
Although this subject has already been raised (in the previous question) it is good to have more solid evidence that people would be more likely to buy a 'charity card' than a regular one.


Question: Do you prefer a blank card or a card with a message?

Answer: Blank

How does this benefit our research?
Again, whilst this question has already been asked (albeit in a different format) it confirms that we would be best off to not include any message in our cards.


Question: Do you normally buy Christmas cards in multi-packs or individually?

Answer: Mixed (results showed both individually and in multi-packs)

How does this benefit our research?
I feel this question has been beneficial to our research because we were unsure of how we should sell our cards - as separates or in packs. However, since there was no definite result from this question it hasn't really helped us, but we have decided that we shall sell our cards both on their own, and with the option to buy a pack for a lower price - for better value. This should ensure that people have a choice when purchasing our cards.


Has this research been beneficial?
I feel this market research has been very valuable to us, as it has given us some direction on criteria such as the price of our cards, how we should sell them and the importance of the design.

quick sketch idea

Just a quick little idea I had for our designs...


Christmas trees are obviously a symbol very much associated with Christmas, but I wanted my design to have a slight difference to it. So I imagined how tinsel is wrapped around the tree, and how it sparkles, and I thought about the image being created by a "trail" of stars, giving the impression of tinsel being wrapped around the tree. I don't know if this'll work in the end but as a starting idea I think it's alright.

First Brief Decision

Today we unanimously decided that we are going to design and sell Christmas cards as our product/service. We spoke in more detail about the pros and cons of other possibilities (wrapping paper and a Christmas gift wrapping service) but decided that choosing Christmas cards would work best for our group given our multi-creative backgrounds, and the time frame in which we had to complete this project i.e. design, manufacture, promote and sell our product. The production costs for this project will also be minimal, as all we are really buying is paper and card.
I am glad that as a group we have decided to do Christmas cards, as I personally thought it was the best idea for us to do, for the reasons mentioned above, and also that it will be a good opportunity to put our design skills to work - and I believe we can come up with a creative and unique set of designs for our cards - something not always easy in an already saturated market like Christmas cards.

We were told that we will be selling our product in the upstairs of the SU (Student Union) on campus, shortly before the Christmas break. This means that pretty much all of our potential customers will be either students or lecturers - but having already identified our target market we should be able to make our market research questionnaires more relevant to this potential market.
I have mixed feelings about us selling in the SU, on the one hand it is limiting our customers because only students and lecturers/tutors will be passing through the SU but on the flipside, if we already know our target market then we can focus our designs, promotions and sales strategies around that. However, given our target market other things will have to be taken into account, for example, students aren't genereally willing to part with money, and certainly not when they can buy the same thing somewhere else for half the price - so we'll have to appeal to them both in card design sense and in sales i.e. price, maybe offers such as Buy 2 get 3rd Free. Still, being students ourselves I think we shall be able to make good decisions in all aspects of this project as we can easily relate to a students viewpoint.

We also began discussing potential design ideas, although we need to do market research to find out what sort of things influence people when buying a card e.g. price, design, message, place of purchase (i.e. Clintons), originality, size etc. We shall be doing this market research via Facebook and SurveyMonkey (both based online) as we shall be able to ask a lot of people their opinions very easily, and get results quickly - thus speeding up the design procedure. We decided that the questions we shall ask are:


1. Where do you usually purchase greetings cards?

1. High Street shops (e.g Clintons) please specify
2. Supermarket
3. Online
4. Other, please secify

2. How much would you spend on a christmas card?

1. Under 50p
2. 50p - £1
3. £1 - £1.50
4. £1.50 +

3. What makes you buy a card? (Choose which aspect would most influence you)

1. Price
2. Message (front and inside)
3. Comedy value
4. Image/Design
5. Brand (e.g. Marks & Spencer)
6. Charity card (e.g. Profits to Cancer Research)

4. Would you be more likely to buy a 'charity card'?

1. Yes
2. No
3. Not bothered

5. Do you prefer a blank card or a card with a message?

1. Blank
2. With a message

6. Do you normally buy Christmas cards in multi packs or individually?

1. In a multipack
2. Individually

Once we have results from our market research we can identify our target market, what appeals to them and thus what we should consider when designing these cards for sale.

First Brief

Today we were given our first brief - to come up with a product/service that we can market and sell over the Christmas period.


Exploring Creative Business

You are about to commences the first phase of the design, manufacture, promote and sales aspect of your module activites. You need to think of an item that is feasible to develop within the timescales listed below. All members of the group are expected to contribute to its activities. Individuals will be asked to score one anothers contributions to the project - and these comments will be taken into account when allocating final marks.


Key Dates

Commencement date: 28th October 2009
Completetion date: 25th November 2009
Sales oppertunity commence: 30th November - 16th December
Interim feedback: 16th December


Working in groups:

1. Decide on your company name
2. What is your mission? What are your aims? Objectives?
3. Sort out your strategy: Where do you want to go? How are you going to get there?
   
4. Decide what you are going to offer for sale - in terms of either a service or a product
5. Carry out a SWOT analysis..
6. Carry out a PESTEL analysis

* * *

After being given this brief we organised ourselves into groups. I am working with Ric and Kieran - graphic design students like myself, Imogen and Helen - 2nd year illustration students and Bev - mature textiles student. Although we have quite a large group (the suggested number was 4) I think that having students from all across creative fields can only benefit us, plus the more people we have, the more ideas and solutions we can come up with - something which is always going to be important in a design subject.

We discussed a few possible ideas in class today as a group, but we shall make a final decision next week and begin work.

Possible ideas included (pros + cons):

1. Christmas cards
Pros:
Everybody buys Christmas cards
A good oppertunity to put our creative skills to the test
Easy to manufacture
Cheap to manufacture
Cons:
There are a lot of Christmas cards already in the market
Unless we can offer something special, why would people choose our designs?

2. Wrapping paper
Pros:
Another nice project for design work
Cons:
Could be hard to print cost-effectively
With so many cheap shops offering wrapping paper we would have to have great designs at outstanding value to attract potential customers, and this could be very difficult to achieve

3. Gift wrapping service
Pros:
Requires minimal materials for set up (if any) and this reduces costs
Cons:
Most people would not be willing to pay for someone to wrap their Christmas presents, when they can do it themselves for free - especially in this economic climate.

I personally think that the Christmas cards idea would be best for our group, as it can be easily achieved with good results, and it will put our creative minds and skilled fingers at work, without being too challenging. The cost of materials would also be minimal, but if the cards were of a high standard then we could easily make good profits (not that it would benefit us personally since any profits are going to charity) but surely making good profits is essentially what a business is all about?
When we meet next week we shall discuss any further thoughts we have had on the matter and decide what product/service we are going to provide.

Exploring Creative Busines

This blog has been set up by me to record my work and thoughts whilst studying the elective course Exploring Creative Business Enterprise. This course will run the length of my university year, and we will be set briefs to work to either in groups or alone.

I feel this will be a good opportunity for me to not only gain some insight into how a professional creative business may run, but I will be able to work as part of a team (both part of project teams and as part of the class as a whole) creating creative solutions - something that so far I have only achieved on my own.

I feel very positively towards this course and I feel I have a lot to gain from it. Here's hoping...

First things first...

Let's get this going.

Appears to be working?

Wonderful.