4. Consultation & Prototype

Consult

Today we had a consultation with our professors about how the general direction of our business will be in the next few months. We touched on matters such as outsourcing, pricing and marketing. One advice they gave us is to build a presence on Facebook and Instagram early on, regardless of whether our products are out yet. This was actually quite in contrary to what I thought at first, as I felt that our products have to speak for themselves, therefore we should focus on building our products first. However, it makes a lot of sense to build a theme first using social media about our start-up concurrently as we develop our prototypes. Our posts may probably go like this: relevant photos and quotes of our theme at the start, photos and videos of the processes of making our prototypes, many "coming soon" teasers and promotional videos, then finally our products when they are ready. This can serve to hype up the public and build up a suspenseful and exciting atmosphere around Flormiere. At least that was what I got out of it. It seems that in running a start-up, everything has to be done early on.

Updated 16/6/19: And just like that, our first first Instagram post is here!

Prototyping

Next, our team gathered all the materials we have bought till now to build our prototypes. Using different glass jars, sand and flowers, we managed to come out with a few designs. Below are some pics of us and our works in progress.

In the end however, we could only come out with one complete prototype, shown above, due to time constraints and materials not up to par.

When I opened the packaging for our glass jars a while back, it was quite disappointing as their quality was not very good. While that could suffice if one buys it for making their own DIY decorations, we are selling out to the public while marketing ourselves as a luxurious brand with a relatively higher price. Such glass certainly won't do the trick. After completing the prototype, we did a small survey among our MIE peers and our professors, and the general consensus is that it looks low quality, and no one was willing to spend more than $10 for it. While our budget for this single piece was only $4 and we can make a profit, the problem is as decorations goes, people might not be willing to buy a lower quality product even at a low price. The nature of such decoration products favours high quality materials as it is more of a want than a need.

One other problem is that the process of making one product takes a lot longer than expected. There are a 2 reasons for this. Firstly, the opening of our jar is too small, making it a big challenge to place the stones and flowers in without additional tools such as tweezers. Secondly, the stones requires gluing in each of its layers and the drying takes some time too. In the end, the process took about 40 minutes, a lot longer than the expected (10 mins per piece).

We are not going to sell this design in the future, and have to start the process over again. Next, we will consider buying high quality glass. Many of these glass jars I bought was from China, so maybe we will be looking elsewhere, likely Malaysia. The big problem is that good glasses come from Europe and USA, which do not ship here. The dried flowers that Sindy bought seem fine though, we can still use them in our products.

Interestingly, many including the professors have told us that they liked the design that we put on our front page. That was a product we found on the internet, using a cylindrical glass jar, dried rose and LED lights to build. It will be one of the next prototypes to build. Some have also expressed interest in having long strings of LED lights in the decorations, which will be a good consideration too.

We are probably going Malaysia somewhere around next week to get more tools, till then, bye :)