Final Post

As we all know our product was not completely ready for sale until a couple of weeks before the due date of our project. The first week we managed to sell around 56 bottles out of the 420 total we needed to sell in order to reach our profit goal of 200. The second week, luckily, was thanksgiving break where we managed to sell the rest with an abundance of hard work and dedication on our side. We sold a bunch to family and the bulk of our product to everyday people on the streets and in the homes of D.C. residents. We also decided it might be best to buy the few remaining bottles ourselves in the interest of time saved and stocking stuffers. So we have now exceeded our profit goal of $200 by about 50 cents.

Our brief experience as entrepreneurs has been a relatively good one. Although we have also dealt with our share of stress as all entrepreneurs do, we have learned a lot. Because of the fact that most entrepreneurs end up failing and potentially going in debt, we were happy to survive and make a profit. Although we were never in danger of going into serious debt, there was a possibility of loosing the money we all invested, and for those of us without meal plans, end up going into debt simply because of our need to eat. For these reasons we spent a large chunk of our time trying to think of a business both innovative and cheap to start up. We feel we succeeded in both of these things at least in relation to our peers. It was a close call at the end and we ended up using the bulk of our free time during our thanksgiving break, but at least we got to experience at least a shadow of the sacrifice most entrepreneurs make when it comes to spending time with their families. Overall, we feel a sense of accomplishment by finally reaching our sales goal.

We learned a great deal of lessons and have much to take away from this experience. We now know what it is like to make sacrifices in the name of a business. Those of us who were able to participate in James Madison’s COB 300 program were able to utilize the teamwork skills we learned. Of course with any group project, we were able to work with new people and in the process learn to make decisions and negotiate with different personalities. For this project we had the fortune having a bi-national group. Two of our members are American and one of our members is Romanian. Because of this I think we learned an extra group of lessons that most other groups did not have the good fortune of learning. For example, we learned first hand the importance of double checking on meeting times and places when not all group members share a common first language. In conclusion, we each learned a great deal of lessons that we can now bring with us to help with our future endeavors.

Our baby :)

Here, we are....a new week...a new product was borned...


Our product is called "Healthy Hands" and is a 2 in 1 product:hand sanitizer and oil for moisturize.

It's a 30 ml bottle and contains Water, Glycerin, Mineral Oil, Ethyl Alcohol, Shea Butter, Cocoa Butter and much more.jUST try it and you will be in love with it!

We started selling very fast because of this qualities that it has and we have sold in 2 days 25 bottles! It's pretty good because people don't know about it yet and for this we decided to promote it also in Showker Hall starting with this Monday from 10:00 a.m. We will be there more or less all this week, so we want to offer you a good chance to take care of your hands, your health, your life just for only $1,00! Cheap,right? With many benefits,right?What else do you want?
TRY it-Love IT!

Change in direction

We have decided to take a new approach. Instead of bottling already made sanitizer, we will now be mixing 75-80% sanitizer with 20-25% cocoa butter lotion in order to make our product innovative. With some testing we have found that this mixture almost completely gets rid of the strong sanitizer smell and replaces it with a nice cocoa butter smell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SC3K6KL1N0

It also satisfies a need we have identified. Unfortunately it is still swine flu season. Even more unfortunately, the air is cold and dry outside. A common problem with people is the fact that during the fall and winter months, when the air is dry outside the skin on their hands tends to dry up and crack. So, anyone with enough foreside to sanitize their hands regularly to protect themselves from Swine Flu has to deal with the alcohol which dries up their hands further. Our product will sanitize their hands and moisturize them at the same time, satisfying a common need for the residence of Harrisonburg.

Ok so we finally recieved our shipment for the 1 oz bottles that we will be containing our product. We ordered two cases of 48 bottles which makes a grand total of 96 bottles.

After adding up the costs of required materials we've determined that our initial selling price for the sanitizer will be 1.00 per bottle, or, 2.00 for our hand sanitizer lotion combo! With our estimated 50 cent profit per bottle we are looking at selling at least 400 bottles in order to reach our 200 dollar profit goal for the class. Our goal now is to get a space to sell on campus and make money! In the mean time we plan on selling our product off campus in and around the areas we live just so we don't waste any valuable time.

Name...brands...competitors ..."E.T"

We found the creams, and we have to add the elixir of smothness and moisturizing now.

Next, we made a trip to the main supermarkets(WallMart, Target) to check who are our competitors?

And we found that the biggest one is Purell, followed immediately by the Germ-X. Both are great products but what we want to do is to improve their formulas with cream, that will help us to be in front of their advantage.

We found the name of our product too.This will be called "E.T. Hands".

We want to point that we are going in a green industry and all the product are 100% naturals.
"E.T" has two meanings:
1. Extra -terrestrial , which in our view means a green world, an undiscovered one,not yet:)
2. Entrepreneurial Team, which is our team name and express what we want: entrepreneurial idea has been put in practice.

Our entrepreneurial journey starts now...

We believe in our product because we think that it's exactly what the people want.Why?

Because it can be diversified in many ways, it's cheap, it's faster and can have a long life on the market.We try to make people to fall in love with it.

We want for our product the best ingredients, non-allergic, we want to bring the nature in palm of your hand, we want to make you dreaming for a beautiful "Good morning" everyday at everytime.

For this, we tried to find these ingridents in different kind of markets that can offer us essential oils freshly taken from the flower, trees that can be mixed and create a cream,which will be our added value.

You are sick of having dried hands,especially on a cold weather and not only, because simple sanitizers have just a big percentage of alcohool that is helping us to destroy the germs existed in our hands.That's way we wanted to add more value, and create a product that will give you both:cream and sanitizer.

The cream is the one now that it's the most important for us because we want to have a long lasting smell, the best moisturize and all-skins type.

The result will be:NO GERMS, BABY HANDS!

Germs...flu....FORGET ABOUT THEM!

We live an era which everybody is in a hurry, time is pressing us and we don’t take care so much or we forget the most important thing: our health.
People take a lot of pills but they don’t know that this can be changed only with same small, inexpensive and fast things. One of them is washing hands!
There are about one million of germs on our hands, even though our hands look clean! Most of those germs are harmless but a few can cause illness like flue, common cold and salmonella. In fact, about 80% of infectious diseases are spread by hand contact. We get sick when we touch things that are full of germs and then transfer them to our nose or mouth.
To keep yourself healthy it’s important and you can start in an easy way, just to clean your hands especially after you’ve used the restroom, prepared to eat, been in a public transportation, etc. If you don’t have time or you don’t have a place where to wash your hands we offer you the best choice: HAND SANITIZER!
The product is alcohol-based and can be a convenient alternative, as you can use them on-the-go, you kill in 10 seconds 99,9% germs, and you don’t need water, towel and soap.
The problem is that your skin can be dehydrated by the alcohol and for this we blended the formula of the Sanitizer with a natural water-soluble oils from plants, trees and fruits of the Amazon rainforest with Aloe Vera - an added moisturiser.
Our formula will contain less ingredients, which means less chances for our consumers to have allergic reations. The ingredients themselves will also be all natural which will result in higher quality. As for the plastic container holding the product, we plan on getting 100% recycled plastic in order to insure that our product lives up as a environmental friendly product.