BP5: Consultation And Prototype time!
The Consultation
8th June 2019
Our group went together for the First consultation with Mr Roderick and Adrian, Both our course instructors.
We shared our marketing strategy and key planned timelines that our group intends to follow. Specifically, our planned dates to finish sourcing and prototypes, and our planned placement strategy.
I’ll keep the marketing strategy secret for now (You can see the results of it on our social media pages– and We’ll get back to sharing this after August/during our presentation), but for the placement Strategy, we intend to be there for the customer when they want us. Customers who are already interested in flowers are more likely to buy the flowers if the right qualities are met – Hence we’ll target them first, marketing our competitive advantage of not having to change flowers regularly (due to the dried nature of our flowers). Look out for us on Shoppee and Carousell! We do intend to have physical pop-up stores – However, we have yet to identify good places to set up shop at. We’ll update again when we have places to set up shop at in mind.
Adrian also shared with us a cool video ad that really showed how effective a video can be in whipping up a person’s demand for a product. The key to getting people’s attention in this Instagram age is to create content that looks beautiful and hopefully makes you imagine yourself holding the product – Thus making you want to buy the product – Right NOW.
And that will be where our omni-channel placement strategy will take over – To let customers buy the products they desire, right there and then. Be it on the MRT station or while relaxing at home surfing facebook and Instagram, we want to be there for the customer.
But first, we got to have products to sell. So let's get down to a prototype session!
First Hands-On Prototyping Session
While we do discuss sketches of ideas for our products online, the only surefire way to make sure that the materials we buy would be useful in our final products, would be to test our designs out for real. However, because each of us hold different materials that are all essential to the product creation, this made it pretty difficult to test the suitability of the materials we bought in the products – The only way for now was to meet up, discuss and try it out.
Which we did. And fortunately, we all came together to do it. In this prototype session however, we still did not have all the materials which we ordered. Some products that were supposed to be delivered (From china) took much longer than expected. Thus we as a group must factor in this long lead time in our ordering of materials – Because If we ever encounter a shortage of a certain material, we would end up having a backlog of orders which we are unable to fulfill
But still, we all attempted to experiment and do up a prototype based on the resources we have. I brought in an initial shipment of remote control LED lights, but we couldn't find a way to fit them to our current products.
Just us Getting a little too Excited with our First prototype. Presenting the Flormiere Micro!
From the Prototype session, we realized a few obstacles which our group needs to get through before we can do this business sustainably.
We bought a “terrarium quality” glass container and did our first prototype with the flowers, stones and other materials which we had.
One problem was that the time we took to make this glass container was quite long – Almost 1 hour. But perhaps that could be improved as we look at ways to optimize our workflow.
The more pressing concern was that even though the bottle description was “Terrarium Quality”, The bottle was not as transparent as most consumers would like. See the above finished prototype product to see the results of our first prototype session.
We showed our first prototype to the professors, and they also commented that the glass was not shiny or clear enough for it to be perceived as a high quality good. Which will be a problem since this means we can’t expect our product to fetch a high price either.
Thus our group has since continued looking for alternative suppliers. Our group also intends to explore Suppliers in Malaysia, and see if they are able to supply glassware that would meet our high quality standards.
We intend to be the go-to brand for high quality desk flower arrangements that require low maintenance – So we must go the extra mile to make sure we deliver on this intent.
#StayTuned.