#loe2012

Heyooo!!!

It's your Junk & Funk team

It's been a while since our last post. However, Junk & Funk are still with you! Some main questions answered in this post:

What we have done so far?

What did we do last month?

What are we selling and how we see our company in future?

We have made a lot of products (prototypes). However, we believe that not all of products made are carrying out the idea of being junk and funk. There are some products that are really good but some are not. Nevertheless, we had fun even being unsuccessful, because we were trying to be playful all the time. And being playful, yet motivated by our lecturers we can say that we have caught this "entrepreneurship-like" feeling. And success comes by hard-work.                              

What we did last month, was basically finishing our products and introducing them to bars and cafes in Old Riga. We went to the Old Riga last week and did what our lecturers advised us to do. It was hard to step out of our comfort zone, what is, actually doing sales, however, we went to 20 different cafes and introduced our products. Here are some photos:

What we were surprised of was our results. Although we didn't sell anything we made some contacts; with 7 out of 20 bars we exchanged contacts and 2 bars were really interested in our products and said that they are almost sure that they will order 3 bicycle lamps and 1 infinity mirror (if nothing goes wrong). We must admit that lack of experience in selling our products was the reason why we didn't do better. Last LOE lecture by Z.Tosun was awesome and will definitely help us - this so called "Sandwich method" is the one which we will try to apply next time clearly presenting emotional and rational advantages of our product.

Actually we started believing our idea even more now and we see ourselves as a great team of friends making crazy ideas come true. At the moment we are thinking that we should make products which are more expensive in order to get back more for our invested time. Dealing with small things takes a lot of time and effort selling them. We have been thinking about renovating an old sofa or cool retro chair but at the moment that's impossible due to our limited resources.

Remember, always truly believe in your ideas or else it won't work!

Dear readers,

We congratulate everyone with the New Year 2013 and wish you all the best!

Year 2013 for LĀCIS started with the group meeting and with creating clothes for our brand. We once again gathered together in order to apply our designs to clothes.

We brainstormed, argued,discused, applied and created some of the cloth prototypes. We did our best to make clothes appealing to potential customers and clients. Now some of the clothes are published on the SS.lv platform. We are planing to publish them also on ebay.com or other online shops, where customers can easily order our products.

However, the main task for this and following week is hypothesis testing.

Our 3 hypothesis are:

1. Only hipsters will buy our products.

2. Sales through the Internet will give us more profit than any other sales.

1.      3. We will sell more redesigned clothes than the original ones.

So, for now on, we need to test these hypothesis and see what will work and what should be changed, in order to make our business idea successful.

Cheers,

Hello everyone!

First of all, Junk & Funk wishes you happy new year! It's been two weeks since our last report, since it also was our winter break! Everyone had a chance to relax, spend some time with their families and enjoy different events. Even though it was our break, we still managed to do a couple of things, or at least we tried! One of our team members went three times to Latgalīte, which is a junk market. Sadly, it was closed or there wasn't anything we could use for our ideas. The other thing we would like to point out is creating a page in www.draugiem.lv - the most popular social network in Latvia. it's draugiem.lv/jnf. In this page we are going to publish our created items and hopefully sell at least some of them. More news in the page coming soon. 

We have also talked to one of our lecturers. Since we all know it is quite difficult to sell hand made items in Latvia, we also had to come up with an alternative project. But more about that, if it will be necessary to realize it.

Our team also will be working on business canvas again because it's time to test the most important presumptions. We will also have a meeting with our lecturers soon where we will present our work.

For now, our goals are to work on the draugiem.lv page, realize our ideas and hopefully sell something!

Hi dear readers,

We are happy that this is the last week of school this year, everyone is starting to become a little bit cheerful and happier, despite the cold weather outside. We thing that this is a great opportunity to enjoy some hot beverage, look outside at the beautiful view or read some interesting book. But we can’t imagine these evening with the perfect lighting. Junk and Funk have some new and really cool ideas, that will make your life more enjoyable. Take a look

    We found that these ideas would be perfect improvement to boring and plain rooms.

  Another thing we want to inform you about is that we had our meeting with TA. We discussed many ideas and actually came to the same conclusions as before. We need to continue working on production and need to find places to sell it. We are going to focus more on recycling things, giving them ability to shine literally.

Our New Year’s resolution will be to work harder in LOE. We will talk to you some more after holidays. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  

Neither closeness of Christmas, nor the end of the world prevents Five Wheels from active work with our beloved reflecting hat project Reflo. Intensity of our actions, however, has dropped due to a delay in hat production. Namely, we still have not reached our knitter; and therefore Five Wheels team is not informed about progress in production. Despite this problem, we are optimistic about this week. We probably will receive next five hats. Christmas time could also be our first chance to make sales, because a light reflecting and fashionable hat is a great present for friends or a family.

To make sales and inform at least small audience, Five Wheels will launch a Facebook page. This could be a small step forward in our marketing activities.  Other social media usage will also be considered. This week Five Wheels might also come up with a small Christmas mini-campaign to promote our work and foster sales.

We have even more great news. This week the Five Wheels team met with their mentor who will give advice and track progress of the project Reflo. The mentor suggested not creating a webpage yet, because it could be hard to administer multiple internet platforms. And making a stream in a webpage is not an easy task as well.

Good evening dear readers, our 7 followers to be more precise,

It is campaign week! The new SA board candidates are trying to get everyone's votes, good luck to them. In the mean time our team is continuing to develop new products and new ideas. 

One of the most exciting aspects this week is that the Infinity mirror is the process of being made. We have part of the materials, now all we need is a frame, some glass, wood and some other materials. It is estimated that you can wait for our finished mirror right after the winter break.

The dark part of the year is here, everyone needs lights ._., our team can help if any of our 7 followers are in need of a lighting source. Holla' at us. 

This week our team is planning to:

ummmmm... Wait a bit. Let us think..

Oh yeah, We are going to produce mooooooooore goods :)

and do all of the stuff our lecturers asked us

Same old stuff ..

Here are the goods we have so far needed for our Mirror 

This is how the LED lights look when attached to a surface, our team member's table for example.

All we need to do now is make something equally beautiful using mirrors and stuff' :)

Dear readers,

First of all, we would like to tell you about how useful the meeting with our lecturers was; we got an opportunity to express our concerns and gain some piece of advice. We were concerned of lack of time and investment, but we forgot that this is a learning experience. Thanks for reminding. We got a new telephone number of another sewer Lauma and later on we found out about this Christmas market (participation for freeJ).

Our last week’s biggest accomplishment was becoming sewers ourselves. Not exactly what we expected when applied for this school. However, it was a valuable experience and a chance not to only hang out together but work. We met on Sunday and worked for couple of hours at school. Mostly we created some embroidery on clothes. Collars of knitwear were our concern. Both because it is cold outside and we have them a lot as resources as well. Clothes were already at school waiting for us and materials to work with we took from home. It is funny how much various things for sewing we have, although none of us are sewers. You can see both work process and the result in the photos. These clothes of course need to be washed and prepared for selling. It is still a thing on our concern to-do list.

Why such a rush? Well, we thought of a possibility selling our production during Christmas market, being real salesman and we said yes! Of course, we still need to apply, but as the products are ready it is the least thing to do. This we will do today after a morning meeting.  During his meeting we decided that market time is not convenient, because we wouldn’t make it in time because of lecture graphic.

Girls came up with idea of selling the clothes on ss.lv. We hope to make our profit on that and test one of our test hypotheses that way.

Because of what we have done last week, this week there is even more work to do:

1)     We need to get ready for potential customers on “ss” platform;

·       Prepare clothes-washing, ironing;

·       Price tags, packaging;

2)     It is important to take pictures of our products to finally launch our homepage;

3)     We need to structure our test hypothesis – this week is the start for testing it. 

Capital

Last week Five Wheels team reached a new level of invested money in the project Reflo.  The total amount invested is about 100 Ls. This money mainly is spent on material purchases and labour expenses (knitter orders). Materials are the most expensive, especially, reflective yarn.

Production for a Christmas market on December 13

Five Wheels’ aim was to produce 20 hats till December 13. However, workload of knitters in Riga seems pretty high during December. Therefore, no one is willing to produce our hats. As a result of negotiation, we expect 5 hats for December 13. Unfortunately, the production will be quite sluggish during December. Maybe in January things will improve.

But do not be afraid: in addition to the 5 hats, Five Wheels will include previous prototypes in the assortment. So, there will be even more unique designs for different preferences.

Five Wheels’ ‘’Rat Race’’’

Last week Five Wheels shared their action plan for the project Reflo. However, as some of readers might know, Five Wheels are dedicated to improvisation. For example, last Monday and Tuesday the team experienced a “Rat Race” throughout Riga. When we discovered that our producer will not help us this time, we had to look for materials and new producer. You can see our Tuesday checkpoint list in the map.

1.     1.  Start point at Stockholm School of Economics in Riga

2.      2. Some Italian yarn retailer.

3.     3.  “Adele” yarn retailer

4.      4. “Adele 2.0” yarn retailer, who lied to us that they have the yarn we are looking for.

5.      5. Back to the first “Adele”.

6.       5.Meeting with our producer in Agenskalns.

7.      6. Well deserved meal at “Pankūkas”. (Had to eat fast because it was closing time already)

Five Wheels action plan is bellow. But pay attention to fact that the action plan is just a guideline. The reality differs from our plans in most cases, as the previously mentioned 20 hats production example.

Reflo Action Plan

Stage 1 December 13

Market

·         10 hats

·         Colours, expenses

·         Two reserved for Fionn

  Stage 2 Be ready for additional orders December 22

  ·         Promotion (December 15) e.g. Christmas discounts, twitter&facebook activities

·         Reducing costs

·         Alternative producers

·         Approach SSE Riga administration

·         Online (homepage, Facebook account)

  Stage 3 Branding January 5

·         Specific design element

·         Brand label

Legal issues (earlier if necessary):

Stage 3 January 10

Channels

Approaching cooperative clients

Other channels