PuckerUp

5-11-15

Today we met with Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Velchik and they told us that we were unable to directly relate PuckerUp with the Flint Hill Fund unless PuckerUp donated to the Flint Hill Fund.  Our original idea was to sell the lip balm directly through the Flint Hill Fund, however FHS is trying to get away from transactional gifts.  If PuckerUp donated all of its profit to the Flint Hill Fund, then PuckerUp would be listed on the Flint Hill Fund donors, which would get out name out into the world.
While here, Mrs. Evans and Mrs. Velchik gave us the ideas of marketing PuckerUp through the Miller House by either having samples or selling them in a basket.  Our lip balm would be paired with a business card in which we would explain our story and our emails to order more lip balms.  They also gave us the idea of attending the Fun Fair on May 16th (which Mrs. Starnes also gave us the idea to attend) and they also offered to provide a table for us to set up our product on.  We are not sure if one of us would be able to attend because of athletic conflicts, but we are going to try to market ourselves there.
We are making another batch of lip balm tonight because the bag which contained the 1st batch magically disappeared.  We are altering the recipe a little so that they are less buttery and more waxy.
We continue to make progress on our final project.

The Grind

Recently, we have been very busy prepping for our opening. We just ordered the food, drinks and materials we will need to run successfully! On thursday April 2nd, we presented our business pitch to some members from the school including our headmaster, business reps and other adults. Our presentation went very well and we finally received an answer about the igloo. The leadership board has come up with an idea to work with the parents association by possibly offering a 10 day trial to figure out if everything would work with regard to sharing The Igloo with The Grind Coffee Shop. We have our coffee machines, hot water carriers here and our other inventory is being shipped to the school this week. We have decided that we want to open this coming week. We pivoted from our original idea to open immediately after spring break and decided it would be more efficient if we opened by next week. We are also working on reorganizing our business pitch to turn into a more efficient document to give the leadership board. When ordering our food, we realized that with some companies we can subscribe to their supplies and gain discounts in the future with reordering our supplies. The bottom picture below is our logo that we created for The Grind. We have decided to have our logo printed out and placed on each of our cups, but want to wait until we create some profit to make this investment. The picture on the top is a list of our profit and purchase prices, along with an overall average profit from our intended inventory.

The Grind

This week was all about preparing for our presentation for Mr.Reed, Mr.Thomas, Mrs.Williams and many other teachers. We took the mini business plan we made the previous week and decided what were the most important points from it. We also discussed what would be the most valuable points from our lean canvas and what would be the best presentation format to use. We ended up choosing Prezi to display our presentation for the teachers and picked the most important parts from our business plans. All this planning was done on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday, we went through a dry run of out presentation and prepared ourselves for difficult questions and problems that could occur or be brought up in our meeting. We were not completely prepared for our presentation, because we only have five or six slides, so we will need to make sure that is done by the time we return from Spring Break. Our initial launch date had been immediately following the return of Spring Break, but now we have realized it will need to be pushed back a few days in order to meet and make decisions with regards to location and supplies.