On December 10th, 2018 Port Moody secondary had their annual school bazaar. I was fortunate enough to partake in this opportunity as a person selling an item. Unfortunately we could not buy and re-sell any items nor were any food products allowed. This made us students think outside the box in order for us to come up with a profit and succeed in the bazaar.
Thus, my group came up with the idea to sell tempered glass screen protectors and give service of cleaning the customers screen as a bonus. I was working with a trusted fellow classmate who goes by the last name of Brandon, we decided to sell tempered glass screen protectors since most of our schools students own phones, usually I phones. The company that we came up with was given the name “TEXTRA” which was the words Tech and Extra combined, and our slogan “Textrodinary Products” was pretty similar to the name. We decided that we were going to sell high quality, tempered glass screen protectors, but we met a road block at that idea, since it was just buying and re-selling, so Brandon and I decided we would give them a survey of cleaning the screen (as mentioned above). We also decided to sell phone holders and styli, under the brand name of Textra. One thing that happened that was really important was the fact that we found out that there was another group of older kids, also selling screen protectors, which meant we had competition during the bazaar.
During the week of the bazaar we gained a lot of experience selling, and having competition. We learned that some people would be willing to buy the exact same product but the people working would put on the screen protectors on for them, which is literally saying that you would pay five extra dollars to put the screen protectors on. We did need to change our approach after seeing this and experiencing it, we decided we would keep the same price but also put the screen protector on as well, in order to take the customers at the other stand. After doing this change we managed to have a lot of people come to our stand because our products were cheaper. In the end we managed to get past these road blocks and come out successful by making a profit and selling most of our products. One thing that really surprised us was that we were selling more styli than our screen protectors, and since we thought that the screen protectors would be a big hit, we did not buy a large quantity of styli, which was unfortunate since we had many people buy them.
There are many things that I learned from the bazaar, especially two major things. The first one would be that people are lazy and would be willing to pay extra money for something to be done for them, I learned it buy watching and comparing our booth to the other competing group and seeing what the people who did buy the products want. The second thing that I learned from the bazaar was that you need to adapt and change your course of action as you go, I was able to learn this fact by realizing that we needed to change our service since we were not gaining customers and selling our products. These that things that I learned from the bazaar matter since these things occur in the real world of sales, with big companies, so if I would experience at a young age, then I can adapt to it easier in the future. I think that in the future, we should ask face to face what people want and how they want it to produce the best result we possibly can and to have a better boxing and showing of the products that were willing to sell to customers.
Overall the bazaar was fun, tiring but it did give us a good learning experience. Though we were a bit less motivated from the fact that we couldn’t keep the profit that we made from the bazaar, the kids who joined the course who did it mainly to gain a profit were most likely let down, since this was the first year that the students could not keep the profit that they made. But at the end of the day, I learned a lot, met new people, made enemies and friends, dealt with cranky customers and managed to come out successful.
Very well done!