Ebay

With our bracelets getting a lot of attention through Facebook we thought it would be a good idea to place these onto Ebay the world's biggest auction website. At first we were unsure on how to place them on, we thought we would have to place them on individually which would take forever to do. But once we went to sell an item we had a pop up box quoting that we can post multiple items onto one listing.


This was great for us as we would save money on placing the items up for sale as well as have more control on how to list them, it also has a category where we can have how many quantities we want of each bracelet. This is a great way for our bracelets to get noticed. After about 15 minutes, we had our page up and away.

Here is how our page looks, there are drop downs with the colours you can have which links to a photo and the size customers wish to have. It cost us 40p to set up the page, and for every bracelet we sell, they take 10% which is 25p per sale. I guess all we can do now is wait to see what Ebay has to show. In the mean time we are busy making bracelets through Facebook. We have asked for people to pay through Paypal if they have it or through the bank.

New Order

Well our new order has come through and we are much happier with the 8mm beads, they are the perfect size to make the bracelets. We have been making a few prototypes just to see how they would turn out as we did not expect them to be perfect the first few times. I have been coming up with the colour schemes as it is easier for me to know what a girl is looking for being one myself. We were quite chuffed on how lovely they looked that we decided to make a E&E photo album on Facebook to see what others thought. Within the first half hour we already had a few ordered, it was great! We decided to sell them for £2.50 per bracelet and you that would include a gift bag. Below are some of the photos of our bracelets.

Chocolate Brown and Caramel

Black and Ivory

Baby Pink and Black

Electric Pink, Baby Pink and Ivory

Purple and Ivory

Navy Blue and Ivory

Some of our friends were really taking a liking to them which was great news for us. With a few orders already requested, we were in business. As more people started to ask about them we started to think that we would have to order more as we had only ordered a few packs just to get us started. After discussing about how much we should invest into the bracelets we decided we would order £30 worth of multi-coloured beads. Many different colour combination's can still be created to suit every person. We may even let people decide on there own colours if they so wish. More photos shall be put up soon.

Changes and Maths

A few things have changed since our last post but for the better. When we got our first order come through i was horrified about the size of the beads, i did not realise just how small 4mm beads were. We was not happy with what i ordered and we would not be able to make money from these unless we done them as a set of 4 or 5. So with that said i went to order more straight away for the same colours but in a bigger size you would only get 70 per pack for £1.39. I did not order much to begin with as we had to make sure this order was going to be correct. We only got a few colours to start with and waited for them to arrive.

With the order having to change we now had to re-think about our sales, how to make profit, what price to sale them at and how to sell them.
Our original idea was to sell each bracelet for £1 when we were going to sell the 4mm beaded bracelets, but this is now been scrapped.
If we only get 70 beads per pack for 1.39 which makes that about 2p per bead. There would roughly be around 20 beads per bracelet, depending on the size, which equals only 40p per bracelet. The cord we got cost us £2.50 for 12 meters. So times 39 by 12, (39 inches per meter, 12 meters in role) which equals 468 divide by 10 which equals 46. So we can make about 46 bracelets per roll. which means the cord per bracelet only costs 5p . The crimp beads cost £2.15 for 500, if we use 1 per bracelet then we could make 500 bracelets out of them. This means that each crimp beads is less an half of 1p, giving us the total of about 45.5p per bracelet.
We could still sell the bracelets for £1 if we wish and still make double the money, but i think we can push them up higher because if they are to cheap they may see them as being low quality and walk away.

Once our new order comes through and we start combining colours together, then we can come up with a price then, but for now i think we could sell them for about £2.00, making four times the money for each bracelet.

Market Stall

Over the weekend i found a couple of jewelery market stalls which were selling the same types of products as Ryan and i are going to do. The first one was in Bromley, they had a wide range of man made bracelets with many different kinds of beads. The only thing i found with that was the prices, they were asking for £6 per bracelet which i thought was to high. Although they had many different designs to choose from i still thought they were rather expensive. They were also being beads and charms on there own, but wanted from £1 upwards for just one. They had quite a lot of interest but i noticed that people were walking away empty handed, which i think proves that they were selling them at to much of a high price. You would normally see a price range like that from a retail store.

This should help us when selling our bracelets because we now have a better understanding of the types of prices to sell them for and they also had different types of ages interested, which helps use to believe that girls no matter what your age is will be interested in such lovely beaded bracelets.

Here is a photo of the stall which i took in Bromley, as you can see there are many different kinds of beads used to make such lovely jewelery.

This is making us more confident about our product and is looking forward to the reaction we will get from people. The only thing that we may have to think about is getting beads which are of different sizes we are currently only have stock of one size which is 4mm beads. If things go well then we shall look into getting a wider range but we do not want to get to ahead of our self's and find that they do not sell and would have a lot of stock that we would have no idea what to do with.

Project plan

‐Name of Enterprise: Summers Bracelets
‐Student Names: Karen Flint (Commander In Chief), Ryan Cook (Chief Of Staff)
‐Summary Of Enterprise: We’re going to make and sell a range of beaded
bracelets to promote our BA animation film ‘Summers Treehouse’, to help raise
funds to support our degree show. The bracelets will come in many different
colours and designs that we already pre‐made, or the customer can create there
own one and we’ll help them to make it. Our goal is to do something fun and
different, making bracelets is a good way for us to raise money as people wear
these sorts of accessories as it comes to summer time so we’re in the right time
of the year to exploit this market.
‐Measurable Aims of Enterprise: The main goal for our enterprise is to raise
funds to cover the cost of any expenses related to our degree show, whether it be
the price of printing leaflets, posters, business cards or even providing food and
drink such as popcorn, coca cola or tea and coffee. We will measure whether we
have achieved our aim by the amount of money that we make, if we reach at least
£20 then we’ve doubled the money that we invested into this idea and can safely
say that we’ve had some success and achieved our goal to a satisfactory standard.
‐Target Market: Our product is primarily aimed at a female audience, although
we can still make bracelets for males, the majority of interest will primarily come
from the female market. As our product is a fashion accessory it is harder to
pinpoint an exact target market because fashion interests differ for each
individual, we have to rely on people’s own interest into what we’re offering
them. However anyone can buy them, whether it be for themselves or even if
they’re gifts for other people.
‐Action Plan: Below is our schedule for our idea. We haven’t split roles between
us because we are working on each stage of the project together.


‐Budget: We had to purchase all of the supplies that we need for this idea on
ebay, this included a mixture of different coloured beads, stretch cord, crimp
beads and flat nose jewellery pliers which altogether came to £9.10. An
acceptable target for us would be £30, and that’s with each bracelet costing £1
each, The best case scenario that we would be extremely happy with is if we
could raise £40 or more, whereas the worst case scenario would be if we failed
to raise more than the initial amount that we invested into this scheme.
‐Exit Strategy/Risk Management: The worst thing that could happen is that we
don’t make enough money to cover the costs of all the supplies that we
purchased for the bracelets, in terms of risk that’s pretty low as we will only be
losing £9.10 at the most. However if this plan does fail to take off then we will
have to resort to using one of our other ideas.
The link for our blog: http://summersentrepreneurship.blogspot.com

Jewelery making

With a few ideas come and gone we now have a new business plan which we are sure is not to fail. Our plan is to make bracelets and sell them on to girls/ladies. We are still relating this to our animation of our little girl Summer, and the reason for trying to raise money is to help towards our BA degree show. This includes, making business cards, posters, leaflets and possibly food for the people who may come in to see everyone's work.

We came up with this idea as we were trying to think into a young girls mind, and the type of things they like to do. Making some sort of crafts is very popular for young children. Making bracelets could go to all different types of audiences as jewelery is for any age.

We were unsure on how we were going to be able to make the bracelets so we had to do some research as there are many different kinds of bracelets to make as we as different ways. I found Youtube to be most useful which has loads of diferent tutorials on how to make them. Here is the one which caught my eye the most, they are to make beaded bracelets:



Now that we have a good understanding on how to make them, which was actually a lot simpler than what we thought, it was now time to start searching for beads on the net.
The best website for buying all the items we need were through Ebay. Ebay have a wide variety of beads to choose from, so it took some time to decide on what to buy with in our £10 price range. Below is all the items we need in order to start our business, ranging from small pliers to stretch cord.

Whilst looking through one of the Ebay shops I found some small pliers to help make our bracelets, we were orginally going to use normal ones, but soon found them to be to large.

Here are some lovely tonal pink metallic beads we brought, at first we were going to buy separate colours, but found out this was going to cost us more and we were able to find two different types of beads with multiple colours which will help us to create different coloured bracelets.

Here are some black and pearl coloured beads which are the same types of beads as the ones above.

After some research this stretch cord is what we need in order to place the beads on, i was unsure on what we needed to put them on until we watched the tutorials.

Here are some crimp beads we need in order for the cord to stay in place, we thought we could use tye them together, but we thought that we might find it to tricky and that all the beads would fall off, so with the crimp beads we can just crimp them at the end to put the bracelet together.

All the the images above have been purchased and this cost us slightly less then our price range we had. Most of the items say that they should be delivered within 3-4 days, but with all the bank holidays this may delay the process a little bit. We shall hopefully have all the products by next Friday at the very latest and then we shall be able to make them straight away.
We have already looked into other types of beads which we larger than the ones we have brought, so if the business goes well and customers are interested in more then we may look into buying a wider range of beads. The great thing about this is that it can be applied into lots of items, such as necklaces, bag charms, key chains and watchs.

Easter

Since our last post we continued to go ahead with the drawing competition at a secondary school and there prize would be an Easter egg for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. We were going to have a animal drawing theme so that it would make it fair to all the children. The only thing we have issues are is to be able to get permission from the school to go ahead with the plan. Our plan is to set up a desk in the assembly hall with a notice board to hang up the drawings when it is lunch time and hopefully children would like to enter the competition for only a small fee of 50p per child.

My chief of staff Ryan emailed Wyborne Primary School regarding our course, what we are trying to achieve and what we would like to do in there school. We picked this school because Ryan used to attend there when he was a young boy, and we thought we would have a higher chance of being able to go ahead with this plan.



As the days went by we had not heard anything, and then we remembered how schools broke up later than what we did, so when we had returned to university from our easter break, schools were still broken up. This damaged our idea a lot but we thought we still might have a chance once they returned back on the Tuesday, but we had not heard anything. So Ryan called the school up today to see if they had received the email and to see what they thought. They replied with this idea was not appropriate as they thought that we were exploiting the children as they see it was children giving us money for easter eggs which they did not like.

So with that idea now gone out of the window and with three Easter eggs brought, we had lost our idea and money, although we can eat the Easter eggs, so all is not quite lost.

Another plan is to come in place which i have been thinking about for the last few days as i was getting a little concerned about this plan.