Christmas Fayre

We decided on selling the boxes for £1 because the boxes themselves cost 50p each, so a £1 each was enough money to cover the cost of the boxes and the fillings leaving us with some profit.

Me and Rachel met the other teams early on the morning of the Christmas Fayre to set up our stall. The disadvantage of our stall was that it was upstairs in the Atrium and facing away from the SU therefore there wasn't much custom. The stall was open from 10 a.m til 3:30 p.m. It was based on campus therefore hardly any students were up and out in the morning meaning we didn't sell that many. However, in the afternoon, after I had finished the morning shift, another group member walked around campus selling them to students, which proved to be more successful.

We sold over half our boxes from selling them to students around campus rather than just displaying them on the stall. In order for the sale of our product to be more successful, I think we would have benefitted from better advertising and a better position for our stall (downstairs in the SU). Also, have a stall of our own because we had to share with other teams, which restricted us to how we could display our boxes.

Overall, I think we had a good product that sold reasonably well and we were successful in the planning, marketing and production of our product.

Production

After finding out what the target audience would like to see in our product, we decided what type of designs to put on the boxes and what fillings we were going to use.

Between six group members we allocated ourselves to create different designs to attract a variety of different people. For example, I designed decorative Christmas slips, which would appeal to most people, Madiha designed some floral designs in order to attract the female audience and Robbie designed some graffiti slips to attract teenagers.

Chocolates and sweets proved to be the most popular filling for the boxes so we discussed what would be best to buy around the festive season and decided to purchase some Ferraro Rochers and Terry's Chocolate Orange segments. Whilst we were busy designing the slips for the boxes, another team member went to the market and managed to pick up 26 Ferraro Rochers and a box of Terry's Chocolate Orange for just £8!! We also got some more chocolates from the market, a box of Quality Street, chocolate coins, pear drops and Dairy Milk pieces.

I told my group that we should separate the boxes with chocolates containing nuts in from the boxes with just chocolate in because of people with nut allergies. To save confusion we put the design slips around the boxes containing just chocolate and put ribbon around the boxes containing nuts.

Our boxes during the filling process.

Our boxes and some of the fillings..an idea of how it will look.

We used a variety of popular sweets bought from Poundland to fill some boxes. The sweets we used were dolly mixture, fizzy sweets, cherry sweets, millions etc.

If we had to redo this project again, I think we would reconsider using sweets containing gelatine because they are not suitable for some vegetarians and people who can't eat it.

We managed to fill all the boxes and decorate them with design slips and ribbon ready to be sold at the Christmas Fayre.

Market Research

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LSB22TM

In order to collect our market research we used Survey Monkey because it saved time handing questionnaires out to people around campus and waiting for them to fill them in.

Our target audience are students so we sent the survey to numerous people on Facebook because a vast amount of students have an account and access it regularly.

The questionnaire was short and was simply laid out therefore it attracted more people to complete it.

By using Survey Monkey it allowed us to collect our research and analyse it much more easily than if we had used another method. We used the results to decide how to create the treat boxes.

The market research was worth while as it gave us a knowledge as to what would be most successful and what wouldn't.

Snowflakes

In my Exploring Creative Business Elective, we have to create, produce, market and sell an item. Our group have decided to create little favours for Christmas; a small box containing sweets/mints/chocolates etc depending on what would be most popular after we carry out our market research.

We have bought the boxes off ebay and we are all designing the design slips to accompany the boxes. All proceedings will go to a charity of our choice at the end of the task.

Our group are currently asking people to complete a short survey in order for us to produce and market our product effectively in order for it to be successful.

This is currently what our boxes look like, we need to add our designs and small favours inside once our research is carried out;