Of the many events that happen at SJS in the lead up to winter break, the annual Business Club Winter Market is one of the most anticipated. Our team is excited to take you behind the scenes to learn a little bit more about how we put our business together and the results of this year’s market.
The Business Plan
As part of the Business Club, each group creates a business plan for their student-led business. We started working on it near the end of September. We had to think about management, product, marketing and the sales as part of the plan, and each component comes with its own challenges.
As a team, Fiona came up with the idea of a toy business and suggested we create blind bags of toys for the students. That idea morphed into a variety of toys instead, so that buyers could have more choice. From there, our main strategy was to keep our costs low so that we could keep our prices low while maximizing our profit margin.
Greg sourced the products from an online wholesaler, so we were able to order in bulk for a low cost. That also meant we had to order a ton of stock, but we planned for that. Darcy was in charge of pricing, which was a bit challenging because you don’t know for sure how it’s going to go until you get to the market. Keeping our target audience in mind we priced items based on how in-demand we thought they might be. The cooler the toy, the higher the potential profit.
Our business was named Toys Not Like Us, as a play on the company Toys “R” Us combined with the song Not Like Us by Kendrick Lamar.
Market Day
Market day is a big event and the anticipation definitely made us nervous ahead of time, but once we got going, it was honestly really fun. Having the JK class swarm our booth was a bit overwhelming but also meant we had really matched our product well with our target audience. The energy of the winter market is one of the best parts of the day. It’s really welcoming, albeit a bit chaotic. We all remember when we were student shoppers and had such a wide range of snacks and interactive games to choose from. The Business Club did a really good job of that this year too.
This year there were over 70 student vendors, and we all got to choose the charity that we wanted to support. There were students raising money for Vancouver Chinatown Foundation, Covenant House, BC Aboriginal Child Care Society, David Suzuki and so many more.
In the end our business raised around $200, and with only a $70 cost for our product the rest went to charity. We chose to donate to the BCSPCA, because we love animals, and it’s great to be able to give to a charity that matters to us.
As we mentioned, we ordered a ton of bulk and because of this we knew we were likely to have a lot of leftover stock, which was definitely the case. The great thing about that though is, especially this time of year, there are always people in need of toys. So the remainder of our stock is also going to be donated to the toy drive.
The Future of Business
Overall, we are really happy with our planning and how the event itself went, but there are a couple of takeaways that we are going to remember for next time. In the future, we agree we would put more thought into the design of our booth for market day. We had the items well spread out on our table, but that was a bit chaotic, and we found that some of our target audience weren’t tall enough to actually see over the edge, which made it harder to serve them. Also while the market was really fun, we also know we need to be vigilant because small toys are easy for people to swipe. If we were to give advice to future market businesses, it would be to balance the fun with staying focused.
We’re really proud of our market stall. It was a great way to gain practical business experience and do it for charity. We all chose Business Club and the business course for our DP because it’s so applicable to the real world. The case studies we examine in class are real businesses and the club gives us the opportunity to extend what we’re learning in class into practical exercises. These are skills that we can add to our resumes and may help with future job opportunities. Plus it’s great to have the option to take a course that’s so unlike anything we took in the MYP.
Thank you to everyone who came to the market and student-led businesses. We hope you had as much fun as we did.
