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15th June 2019
In my last blog post, I shared that our group intended to go down to Malaysia to source for better jars.
A few of our suppliers indicated that they were open on Saturday for a half day, hence we decided as a group to go down on a Saturday Morning to have a look at the actual products before making an order with them.
And oh, it couldn’t have gone more out of plan.
And oh, it couldn’t have gone more out of plan.
We wanted to meet at 830am in Kranji (to take a bus down to woodlands checkpoint), and assumed that by 10am, we should have reached Malaysia. By 11am, we planned to have reached the supplier to take a look at some of their products.
Except that we did not expect one factor – A HUGE crowd also hoping to enter Malaysia at the same time.
The result? We did reach the Malaysian check point at about 1030am. But because there was so much people, we ended up waiting till 3:30pm before we could check in! Of course, by then the factories would have closed.
It goes without a saying that if I ever see woodlands checkpoint that crowded again, I'll just call it off right there and go home. It's even more of a waste to stay and waste half a day just on a checkpoint. Just consider the initial travel time as sunk cost - and move on from there. 😂😂
Anyway, we called off the session and took it more as a recreational session for the team in Malaysia – To enjoy the good food there, some of us even painted sculptures!
We also attempted to scour different retail shops to find for competitively priced glassware that we could use for our flower desk arrangements
Unfortunately finding for more glass jars was more or less a futile attempt – If I had to give a rough estimation, Out of 15 glass jars we looked at, only 1 of them may exhibit the level of clarity that we hoped to use for our Flower Desk arrangement. Needless to say, we just bought 6 of those jars that were acceptable enough to use for our future prototyping sessions (and possibly for final product)
Overall, finding good quality glassware at a competitive price is slowly becoming a more critical concern. We will continue researching other suppliers and places which we could order in our glassware from.
Our tired faces after the trip from Malaysia
To ensure our trip wasn't totally a waste of our weekend time, we took abit of time to purchase some fixed assets,
I bought the glue gun and glue sticks from KSL Shopping mall - since we were already there, and I figured a glue gun would really help us to quickly hold materials in place within the terrarium jar, especially with it's quick curing time.
We also bought a few additional items, such as the stones and other decorative material to be used in our flower arrangements. These additional items can also be sourced locally or from online suppliers, but we wanted to quicken our development process so we could start our business soon.
In the meantime, we finally got hold of some of our orders from china (namely the dried roses, which is a crucial part of our desk arrangements). Our second prototype session will be held very soon, and the group hopes to achieve a favorable result from the next meetup!
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