Hopefully I can still get credit
Anyway, I spend way way way too much time working on this class. During the Crash and Burn project my group and I spent massive amounts of time trying to make things and then sell them. I suppose we could have spent less time if we had better ideas with more popularity.
However none of those ideas seemed to be coming, we tried to brainstorm several times and nothing really came of it, we came up with a decent number of general ideas that had a decent profit margin but nothing that really sold itself. There were even several ideas we started to pursue that did not seem to have any potential in them upon further review. Stuff like beer bongs, yellow bandannas, black and gold beads, and a bunch of arts/crafts type stuff; we looked into prototypes for each but people did not seem interested, or we couldn't find them cheaply/easily, so we scrapped the ideas.
Basically our sales plan slowly evolved into a "general store" we set up in the Leonhard building, we tried a bunch of locations and it took quite a bit of trial and error to determine what a good location was. I personally figured in front of the Allen Street Gate would be a great location to sell stuff (primarily hot chocolate) because a HUGE number of people pass by there, but after trying it out we found out that people just buzz by there in a huge hurry for most of the day. Everyone walking by just seemed to want to get somewhere and we did not have the time to establish ourselves as a reputable business, so we decided to try other locations. Lydia tried inside Kunkle lounge one day, but that got even less of a response, then Katie suggested setting up a table in Leonhard, which I was initially very skeptical of because I never have any classes that far away from the center of campus. We tried it out one day and the location worked out great, being that far away from everything in the center of campus actually helped our sales a great deal because people don't have time to get to any normal restaurants downtown in between classes, plus its a huge walk, so lots of people just came and bought stuff from us. It also helped that Katie knew a ton of people that were walking by.
We mostly focused on selling hot chocolate because it was fairly simple, not readily available, and had a great profit margin. The weather changed in the last week of the project and we decided soda would probably sell better than hot chocolate when it was 65-70 degrees out. We also sold other odds and ends from previous money making ventures (cell phone charms, candy, Steelers ribbons) as well as doughnuts (which we sorta used shady marketing to sell, Giant brand doughnuts in Dunkin Doughnuts boxes). On one of the last selling days we had, we decided to try selling pizza. I was not present for any of the selling of the pizza but Katie said she sold out of like 8 pizzas in a few hours, which was fantastic, if we had figured out that pizza would sell that well earlier we could have made way more money.
While this stuff made us decent amounts of money it was all very very time consuming. We basically had to man the stand all the time, which turned into straight begging for money. I didn't even spend the most amount of time at the stand, Katie did. I had classes elsewhere all the time, and Lydia had meetings or classes most days so Katie got stuck sitting there alot.
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