BP10: Our first customers
14th July 2019
While we were busy with our development, we share some pictures of us at work in our personal instagram accounts, while we work on trying to get more likes and followers of our Instagram and Facebook pages. By doing this, all of us, the co-founders of the brand, would act as "advocates" of the brand, and use our personal social media reach to advertise our brand (and hopefully attract likes/followers of our flormiere business account.
To our surprise, our developmental works have attracted enough attention from a few acquaintances, who wanted some floral decorative pieces to be created for them. One of the projects requested was to design a floral decorative piece that was suitable for commemorating a graduation, and 3 orders were for different types of designs which would be suitable for office desks. We set our prices at about $25 for designs that do not use LED lights, and $35 for LED Lights (As part of our price differentiation for more premium products, as more skill is required to come up with designs that utilize LED lights).
Concurrently, Sindy sourced for some additional materials from a local distributor, such as figurines and preserved moss, to work on and see if we could come up with better looking designs, The following weekend, our group came together to work on these four products.
It was interesting to see how each of us contributed in different ways to the making of the product.
Some of us had a rough idea of the kind of design we wanted to create for the product, so they started work on the designs they wanted to create. For that prototype session, I couldn't come up with a design that seemed as compelling as the others, so I supported the creation of their products instead. I concentrated on being the "Specialist" when it came to making the products literally lit (i.e. fixing the LED lights in a way that would elevate the designs imagined by my other friends).
Somehow, I was good at this. Perhaps my engineering background? XD
Anyway, This took some imagination on my end to find a way to Securely place the LED lights in a way that would not ruin the design of the product. While our LED lights were made of thin, flexible, wire, it was a challenge to coil and bend the LED Lights in the right way.
For instance, the finished product at the right, called "鱼你相遇 (Fate brought us together)", features LED lights that are designed to subtly light up the blue stones which represent the ocean, as well as the preserved white moss, which represents the corals in our beautiful ocean. Well this design looked great in our heads, it was quite challenging to make. How were we supposed to ensure that both the "ocean floor" and "corals" both get just the right amount of lighting to look good?
This took some ingenuity from my end, attempting various ways of coiling the LED lights, as it required the LED Lights to be coiled at the right diameter, shape and bent in a precise angle, so that the lights would not be too glaring or too subtly lighting up the stones. Then, there was the challenge of gluing the lights in the right spot, as the glassware that would be used to house this was a tad too small for the glue gun to comfortably let us glue the lights in place. It took close to 40 minutes just to get the LED lights in the right place! While this development time was long, Hopefully in future, if recreating similar designs, I would be able to take the learning from here to do this process in a faster manner.
Regardless, I thought the finished product looks pretty good - See the picture on the right!
I also came up with the idea of using our solar powered LED light resources to light up another one of our products to be sold to our customer. Again, coiling the LED lights in the right manner was crucial - This time, because we needed the LED lights to light up the contents of the container (Which were below), it took some precise "tweaking" of the wires to get the LED lights to shine with the right brightness intensity.
Fortunately this one took about 15 minutes or so, and I reckon that our customer would be pleasantly delighted by this nice addition, as this LED light was solar powered and had its own rechargeable battery within, thus being truly maintenance free from a user perspective. ;)
Within a couple of hours, we finally created some of these beautiful designs, ready to ship to our customers. But there's more!
Photography
The people's impression of our brand is only as good as how we represent it. As a new start-up without any branding or past legacy, no one would know how good (or bad) our products are. Thus we must market our products - Showcase them to the world, show them what their money can get them ;)
I was in charge of the photography of these works. So here's me and Sindy in action, blocking the light to recreate the "Dark" environment that would let our products look cooler. As a (Cash-strapped) Start-up, We did not have professional equipment. But we do know how to improvise ;). I'd say The result was not bad!
Logistics
For now, we plan to personally deliver these products where possible, as we have not been able to find a logistics partner that would be able to provide the amount of care needed to ensure that these products do not get destroyed during shipping. These products require quite a margin of care to transport.
Stories
To make our products even more meaningful, after designing each product, we also came up with stories for each product. This allows the customers to be better able to relate to our products, as they brighten up their office desks. At the same time, it makes the perceived value of our product higher as well.
However, While our final products looked great, finance was a concern
After getting home from a day of creating these exquisite looking flower designs, I sat down to work out our company's finances. Specifically, I wanted to track the COGS of each product, factoring in the cost of materials and labour. As cashflow is the blood of our start-up, and we do not want to drain the company of too much resource, I've used a labour costing of $8 an hour to have a feel of how much the business was actually earning.
Unfortunately, in calculating this, I realized that after factoring in our labour/salary expense, with our current price point, our company's margins were pretty low, at less than 10% of cost. In fact, one of our finished products actually caused our company a tiny loss, as we took too much time to create the product.
It was at this stage where I noted that doing custom designs would always cost us substantially in terms of labour hours, as it required us to not only think more deeply to find a way to turn our planned designs into reality, but also source for new materials to make the idea "happen". After discussion with the group, we will thus be making some ready-made products to sell on our online platforms and offline platforms, since over time, we will find ways to make our production process for these products a little faster, thus making it more profitable to make those products.
Do see Blog post 10b, which also details another problem: The viability of opening a pop-up store within the initial 3-4 months
My Innovation and discovery with the String LED Lights
Currently, we use special LED Light Strings, shaped to fit the terrarium design's well. However, one small problem which bugged me about these LED Lights are that it uses 2x CR2032 Batteries. While that in itself is okay, it is operational cost our customer has to incur if using the LED Lights to brighten up his desk
However, I found a way to get the lights to work with a single CR2032 battery. The battery life, be it with 2 or just 1 battery, would still be longer than 12 Hours when continuously lit! The only caveat would be lower brightness of the LED Lights (Brightness is lowered by about 30-40% if using 1 CR2032 Battery, compared to using 2).
However, I feel consumers won't mind having more ways to use their products. Plus, it's much more eco-friendly to have an option to use less batteries!
Other things we have done since the last blog post:
Sindy has went to find more potential jars we could use for our designs locally. However, we were only able to find low quality jars which were not clear enough to look high quality. She wanted to find a way to polish the cloudy glass jars, but I feedbacked that there was no economically feasible way to improve the look of cloudy glass jars, so we did not purchase any of them .
However, as mentioned earlier, her efforts aren't in vain - she managed to find a great distributor which had interesting resources useful to making better floral office desk decoration designs. :)