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

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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

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