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.