So today was full of drastic changes. After sitting down and attempting to calculate our wages from product sales we've realised how little we're going to make. This has caused an overhaul in our costs and spending.
We will not be based in a studio anymore, we will all be working from our own homes and alongside our own jobs. This will drastically reduce our spending meaning the only thing we will need to invest money in will be products, market stalls for promotions and the web domain.
These work out as such:
Costs
1000 printed cushions (based on previously located alibaba store- £583
1000 printed tote bags- £97
Storage space- £1291 per year
Market stalls- £55 per day (roughly 4 a year for £220)
Web domain- £17 for two years
Total: £2199
Breakdown over a year
Selling cushions for £20 (£20000 minus cost of product £19417)
Selling totes for £10 (£10000 minus cost of purchase £9903)
Total Profit: £30000
Total minus costs: £27801
Our strategy as far as promotion and business will go will be starting very small and growing. Using social media and four market stalls a year we will promote the beginning of the business. We will then move into small retailers approaching stores such as Fabrication in the Light or Yellow Sunrise in the Corn Exchange.
We hope to take any profits we make and put them back into the business, expanding the product range, making new patterns and designs.
Eventually we'll begin approaching larger retailers within our target market such as John Lewis, Debenhams or Ikea asking them to sell amounts of our products. However we wouldn't offer the full range giving people incentive to still purchase through out website.
The dream for the future is to open our own store with studio above it where we could all eventually quit our jobs and work full time on designing pattens and managing the business. We would sell a full range of our most popular products in store with options to order in specific items and we would stick to our ethos of releasing new collections every four months and retiring older collections to keep our items unique and in demand and rotating the products in the store to promote newer collections.
We would also like to run workshops in the studio including workshops on designing patterns for products where people pay to take part in the workshop and get to design for a cushion that will be delivered to them made up with their pattern.
We would also like to run a paid internship where an intern would help around the studio and the shop, learn about our processes and in return they would make a wage as well as being able to release a one off design for products produced themselves.
There is also opportunity to run one off designs produced by outside designers across Britain and around the world for a specialist designer collection to run along side our own.
As a whole this will make the business a lot more difficult to run and certainly there will be a lot of juggling involved in starting up, however, nothing worth doing was ever done easily.
