BP15: The Pivot to Success (Hopefully!)

5th August 2019

Since our last consultation with prof, our group has decided to go all-in on our new pivot route

We will focus on producing DIY Kits which interested customers can buy and assemble themselves

This comes with many advantages, including:

  • Sustainable Logistics: If packaged right, It makes the products much more easier to transport. We can use delivery services such as Singpost Smartpac or Ninjavan to take care of our packaged products. This means we don't have to personally deliver every product created (yay!)
  • Costing: As we can cut on the amount of labour cost required to make each individual product, we can factor in substantially less labour cost if we can sell enough DIY products. This leads to us being able to offer better pricing compared to the competitors, especially factoring the first point.
  • Customer Appreciation for DIY: There will be some customers who may want to tweak (for example, the amount of sand), or layout, or build on top of our "Base" DIY Packages for a true customized product, personalized just for their friend. Such an audience will appreciate this new direction

Thus, on 5th of August, we started off planning the launch of our new product line. To cater to the tastes of our customers, we will discussed and selected 4 types of DIY designs that customers can pick from. We chose designs that not only looked good - but most importantly, are easy for customers to do. Then, we decided that we would make DIY videos - Prospective Customers can watch our video to see how easy it is to DIY the product themselves. Furthermore, to make things even more easier for our customers, we will pack and pre-process some of the materials (e.g. the amount of sand to put in, as well as the sticks on the figurines to ensure they can stay in position on the finished product). Customers will need to only assemble the sand and preserved moss by following the video, and sticking in the figurines in the right places.

After sourcing a few more materials from our suppliers, we met to do the first DIY Package design and videos - Basically our first design is a remake of the Giraffe terrarium. We tried our best to give the resulting videos a professional look where possible.

Sindy did the initial designs, and I Filmed and edited the videos after. Jiacheng had created the owl design, but rather than make it a DIY product, we kept that design as one only available as a Finished product for now - due to the complexity of doing it.

Anyway, Here's a quick snippit of what we could create for future instagram posts. Furthermore, we will create videos of differing lengths (1 for instagram posts, as a quick guide of how our product can be made), as well as a more in-depth video tutorial that customers can watch.

Sindy and I have some working knowledge on Adobe Premiere Pro and Videography, so we hope to split the editing works for other DIY Kits, and come up with decent instructional guides that customers will enjoy following when they buy our products.

Marketing gets a Boost!

8th August 2019

Our group also plans to increase our marketing efforts and reach. We have discussed and planned for more solid activities to increase the market awareness of our product offerings and positioning of our brand. Each of us in this venture have a part to play in the marketing activities. To better concentrate our marketing efforts, we will focus on Instagram as our main platform to reach to our target audience. Facebook will require minimal maintenance as we will only use it for messaging and re-sharing posts on Instagram.

We have discussed as a team and have set aside some budget for creating more promotional content and reaching out to customers. As my main course of study is in Marketing, I'll be assisting Kimmy to ensure the promoted marketing assets created are attractive and carry clear promotional messages, and we hope to get the most out of our marketing efforts.

For starters, since 8th August, our group has launched a Promotional Contest on our instagram account. To Celebrate National day, One of our lucky Followers who participate in the contest will get to choose a Finished Terrarium Design of their choice, and have it delivered to them for FREE! With our promotion, This allows our target audience to immediately know what kind of products we sell in Flormiere. In addition, the simple instructions that our target audience goes through when entering for this contest allows us to inform them about our new product offerings in future (for example, announcement of our new DIY Product range and shopping platforms).

I have done up the assets (Pictures and the Game Mechanics) for our National Day Promotional Contest. Some considerations were that I ensured that the instructions were easy to follow, and that most importantly, the promoted assets look eye-catching and professional, to encourage interested audience to participate in the contest. We have since pushed out this promoted piece on our Flormiere Platform (embedded below).

Look out for our results, I will share more details about the considerations factored in within this contest on a later post, and we hope to have some great news to share from this! In the meantime, here's how our contest looks like on Instagram: