Problems for the Huskies

In an attempt to launch Hungry Huskies, we have come across quite a few problems. Since our last post, Robert and Conner were able to go to Costco and buy the inventory we needed to launch. The first problem we came across was on the issue of storage. Since we were denied access to the lockers, we decided to temporally store our inventory in Mrs. Starnes's cubicle. However, this plan failed because they saw us bringing in the snacks and told us food wasn't allowed to be stored anywhere but the Igloo. In a final attempt to store our snacks, Mrs. Starnes reached out to the Parent's Association to ask for access to the Igloo. Thankfully, they quickly approved our request and we were able to secure room in the Igloo to store our goods. We tried to make an announcement so we could launch sales but the student announcements at town meeting this week were both canceled for other speakers. Below is a picture of one of the flyers that we put around the school to make everyone aware that Hungry Huskies will be launching soon! Since we weren't able to launch sales this week, a goal our team has is to launch sales the week following our Thanksgiving break. I think although we have been faced with a lot of problems, we have worked hard to overcome them and should aim to continue to improve our efficiency and work ethic through lots of effort.

Progress

Since we have launched FHStress we surprising sold out of stock in 2 days. After restocking, we have sold a few more. Our marketing is still being worked out, however, word of mouth seems to have been very successful for us so far. Obviously this will not continue, and at that point, we are putting our marketing into full speed.  We are a tad worried that the hacky sacks will not sell as well, seeing as they don't have the fun emoji appeal of our stress balls. We are planning to return them when they arrive, and are now searching for other products with the same social media appeal

Wait... NOVA Clothing Company? What?

So, as you may have seen in the title, there is this little thing now called the NOVA Clothing Company. What is it you may ask? A new clothing company by the founders Duncan and Peter. But how do you think the shirt business will get you good profits? Well, we already have 10 orders, even prior to the time that we have actually decided which website we want to buy from. We have a design, which is the one seen below, and we are planning to make a website so that people can buy it online, and they can also preorder through our twitter, @thenovaclothing. We are undecided on which website we want to buy from because the cheapest options seem to have lackluster reviews, so we want a shirt that people would be more than willing to pay $25 for. We do not want to disappoint the customers that are willing to pay a semi-expensive shirt. We want to order today, preferably and have the shirts come in at least 2-3 weeks before Christmas. The orders that we have already have been from me talking to my connects outside of the Flint Hill community. I am positive that when we ask the Flint Hill community, we can get orders easily. Depending on the price of the shirt, we are planning to pay between $250 and $300, and each shirt we would like to pay around $15 for. There are websites that offer them for under $10, but these websites seem to have terrible reviews and seem very unreliable such as ooshirts and mugsdiscounts. We are to decide a company to print today. We are predicting profits of approximately $100-$200, with a business which will help us with sales. We are thinking about buying from 4 imprints, but we are still not 100% sure from where.

To Infinity and Beyond

Throughout the past two weeks, our team has made a slew of changes ranging from our marketing campaign, all the way to renaming our company. To begin, the changes in our marketing campaign were the direct result of our two newest customers. Through this recent acquisition, we realized that we had gotten in touch with both of these organizations through social media and grassroots campaigning. Which lead us to a big decision in not publishing our website and putting forth effort in different areas of our business, specifically in the social media and grassroots campaign. Despite our recent customer acquisitions, we need to focus on reaching out to more and more potential clients and the only way to do this is to focus our efforts on this part of our business. 

Lastly, through much debate and consideration, Danny, Nathaniel, and I have decided to change the companies name. This is for a number of reasons, but mostly because the word "Infinity" symbolizes an infinite number of possibilities for our company and for our clients. #ToInfinityandBeyond

Individual Reflection

Our business is going to launch this week. We had a little setback with our storage space but we got it solved when Ainsley and I stored our merchandise in the Igloo. Robert and I will be handling walk up sales and Ainsley will be handling all of our orders. I am very excited to begin work on this project and see what we can make out of it.

Personal Reflection

Unfortunately, for FHStress, our Go Live date had to  be postponed due to the fact that our town meeting this week did not include a student announcement section. We would like to let the school know that we are selling before we actually begin, but it seems that wont be possible. We plan to start selling today, even without everyone knowing about us. As of right now we have sold 12 stress balls without formally setting up shop. We plan to sell 12 more today. After getting a little bit of feedback from some of the community, we have moved our prices down to 2 dollars. The majority of those on campus either don't have change or don't want to pay the extra $.50 (like it makes a difference). Either way our soft launch has gone very well. (matter of fact once we sell our 12 more today we will be out of stock)

Running through the Flint Hill School with my woes

So the past few weeks have been very unsuccessful in the lives of Duncan and myself. So I was talking a few weeks ago about making hotline bling T-shirts. They were so fantastic and they looked amazing. Only one problem, Drake has copyright on the artwork. We were told that we weren't able to do it, and although there isn't any official documentation online that cans support the fact that it is copyrighted, we were told not to take chances like this while using the schools money. So we have come back to phase one. The progression that we are trying to push into phase two is quite frankly terrible. True, we are trying our hardest and trying to think of something good, but we have reached sort of a barrier that is going to take some hard thinking to get over. Although we are not in phase 2 yet, we have some ideas that may bring us to that stage. One idea we had was to have mugs, maybe Flint Hill mugs or mugs students would want to buy as a nice Christmas present for their parents. Another idea we had was T-shirts that are satire of different candidates in the upcoming election. We have made some very funny ones about Donald Trump, because quite frankly, he is very easy to make fun of, and we are trying break past this impediment.

FHStress First Step

Our inventory has arrived and we already have a potential order from Mrs. Turner. We initially thought that the social appeal of our emoji stress balls would be our driving marketing force. However, since she ordered 12 stress balls, it is possible that our product catches faster as a tool for helping students focus. This could open up a larger market of students in learning center that might need a tool to help them focus on their schoolwork. This will also expose our product to all of her students. We are selling them at $2 each in this large order, but I feel that the easy publicity will result in more business than the $6 less that we made on the order. At a price of 2.00each (a discount for this bulk order) that is a total of $24. While $24 ($7 profit) seems like a small amount of income, that is a 9% gross increase on our total equity.

As a team, we are we are working rather well together. We've split the jobs we have into 4 general categories: Inventory (Ian), Marketing (Chris) General Management (Rohit) and Sales (All of Us). We've been doing our jobs very well. Ian has already gotten our product, Chris has started creating our twitter and pamphlets, and Rohit has contacted faculty to make sure our selling space is open. Overall we are moving at a good pace, and are very excited to launch next week.

Duncan and Peter Inc. Update

This past week has been a rough one for our business. We eventually came to the realization that we could not create a clothing business without completely standing out from others on an extremely limited budget. We then went to the idea of creating shirts regarding drakes hit song, “Hotline Bling,” but because of copyright issues, we were not able to produce these shirts. We have had to go nearly back to scratch in order to create an idea for a business that is completely different from our original ideas. Peter and I are basically in a frantic state of mind in order to come back from these failures, and take what we have learned to make a good product or service that people will desire. Right now we are thinking about doing custom decals for computers since everyone at our school has a computer, or a possibly coffee and energy service that we would run in the morning in case people need to wake up. The coffee and energy drink service seems like it would be the best option right now, but after putting a lot of thought into it, I am not sure if we have the time in the morning, or the storage area for our inventory. We might also think about doing custom mugs for the upcoming holiday seasons. At this point, we just want to make a product as soon as possible that we can sell to people.

-Duncan and Peter

Hungry Huskies Group Blog 3

Hungry Huskies are busy preparing for our launch next week so that we can bring our classmates good snacks. We have figured out a system for how we will balance orders with walk up sales. Our one problem is still finding a space to store all our snacks. We contacted Mr. Herman and he said we can't keep food in lockers. We plan on launching next Wednesday so we will make an announcement at the next town meeting to let people know that we will be selling our snacks. Robert and I are going to get the  snacks on Sunday so that we can store them and be able to sell them by Wednesday. We finished our business plan and we have all of our roles so we are pretty much ready to launch. We just need to get all of our inventory from Costco. We are launching on Wednesday!!

School sucks less with Candy Express...

Well, to be completely honest, Hayley and I have not had it easy in school. At this point, our senior year, the time that is supposed to be where we create memories that will last for the rest of lives... we are completely lost. Buried in homework, tests and quizzes, and tasked with the seemingly impossible task of getting into a college, we find it hard to say something positive about our learning experience. Based off of this negative perspective, we developed a slogan for our business: "School sucks less with Candy Express." We thought this was a sheer stroke of genius. Our teacher, however, did not agree. We've decided to chalk this up to creative differences, but may end up changing our slogan to better fit our product.

We're at the point where we've realized that though our business idea was easy enough to generate, now we actually have to do it. Whoa.

- J & H 

On The Rise

On The Rise

DOA Design Services

Since creating our new company, we have had great success in the initial steps for creating the foundations of our company. However, finding customers has proved to be a quite difficult task, as we currently lack the network of clients we were shooting for in the first few weeks of business. Luckily, my previous business NasaCreative was quite popular in 2013 and 2014 on Instagram. Over the course of the two year period, I was able to build strong relationships a come into contact with sports agents and marketing agencies, as well as athletes themselves. I have sent out emails to some of my connections, and I am currently waiting on a response. Over the next couple of weeks we will try to connect with at least 5 business that are interested in our services. We have a nice selection of sample work that our designer of the company has worked on to try and lure in customers. We look forward to seeing what kind of responses we get from potential customers, both positive and negative, if any. As of now, we do not have any customers so there is not much information to release. However, in the future there will be.

Advice from an Entrepreneur: Ann Dolin Visits

Yesterday we had the privilege of a visit from Ann Dolin, the founder of Educational Connections. She also happens to be the mother of one of our students, Will Dolin. She shared her story of moving from teacher to stay at home mom to tutor to entrepreneur.  Ann talked about how she turned her passion for teaching and helping students into a thriving tutoring business. 

As her in-home tutoring business grew, her neighbors complained that their street was overcrowded by a steady stream of cars coming to her home. She had obviously identified a need in her community and it was time to scale the business.

Ann described the challenges she faced as she went from a tutor to business owner and advised the students to know their own weaknesses and hire the best people to help them. For their businesses to be successful, she said, they must treat them with legitimacy, not as a hobby. Metrics, for example, are an essential tool in terms of growing a business. Track and study customer acquisition methods so they can build on what is working and change what isn't. Ann also suggested that students form helpful relationships with other business to benefit from reciprocal referrals. Especially important for growth is also to set goals and evaluate progress toward those goals, track demographics, and market to key customer types.

Ann's overall message was for students to find their niche and figure out how to make their businesses different. Ann encouraged all of the students to pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship despite the difficult times that they will surely face. She reminded them to take control of their own destiny and put in the work to build a business they can be proud of.