Tipping Point Blog 3

I knew I would reach this point eventually, and it is with great regret to announce that I am calling BS on Malcolm Gladwell.  The more I delved into the idea of a Connector and their ultimate importance in our society the more I cared about them less and less.  Gladwell says Connectors have as many as 4 to 5 times as many "acquaintances" as mere mortals, and thus play an integral role in how news, trends, and ideas travel.  These Connectors he explains often have worked in many different industries and sectors and therefore are the link between worlds that would remain separate without them.  While I understand that they exist, I don't think they are important at all.  In terms of mass media and nationwide trends, you might need 5 million of these connectors to make your product famous.  If you spread your product through the regular plebiscites, you might need 10 million people in order for it to gain real importance.  The difference between reaching 5 and 10 million people may seem like a lot, but once you reach a certain point, anything past that is basically meaningless.  For example, if we sell 100 calendars and make $1000 I'd be very happy, and if we sold $250 calendars and made $2500 I wouldn't be that much more pleased than if we had sold 100 because once we make a good profit, anything after that is a bonus, but not a necessary bonus.  The difference between the quality of life of someone who makes $10 million a year and someone who makes $30 million a year is similarly marginal.   The difference between a $150,000 car and a $400,000 is also barely noticeable.  While I have digressed a fair amount, my point is that Connector's do not make the world go round as they spread information only slightly more efficiently than non-Connectors.

C4E Week 3 In Class

Week 3:

At the beginning of the week I mainly focused on the Foam Home and reworking the finances and P+L statement.  The cost of goods seemed exorbitantly high, especially for coffee, so I did some research myself yo figure out where the $9,000 a month cost in Part 5 was coming from.  The first results that came up were articles about the recent surge in coffee prices from $1.20 to $1.75 a pound.  While this might have been bad news for the rest of the coffee business, it was a huge relief for us at the Foam Home.  To solve for our COG per month for coffee I researched the weight of coffee beans per cup.  Then I multiplied that by our estimated cups sold per day, and from there per month.  It came out to under $400.  I did the same thing with coffee, tea, flour, and sugar to complete the rest of our COGS.  Are abysmal margins and low profits became slightly less abysmal and low, but we were not going to be millionaires any time soon.  It got me thinking about Starbucks and how the behemoth could possibly make so much money when the expenses of operating a coffee shop were so high.  I think the answer is not in the individual shop.  While I don't have the finance data from any one Starbucks franchise, I would hazard that their revenue wouldn't pop off the page and wow investors.  I think the secret to the success of the company is the sheer volume of operating venues.  Even though each one doesn't generate millions, they each retain decent income and when you add all of these returns together, that's when the magic happens.  I could be 100% wrong, but we calculated our returns based on 120 customers per day.  While some Starbucks serve 500 customers per day, they also have more people working at a time, so their costs are not too dissimilar to ours.  Another reason may be that the larger a company becomes, the more efficiently it will run because it has all the data points needed to calculated how to generate maximum returns.

Towards the end of the week, I focused on the $300 project.  We had a monumental marketing snafu by a couple of group-mates feeling adventurous (which I did not condone) that required cleaning up, but I think we were able to remove the posters before too many people were aware of their presence.  The biggest issue with our project right now is the price point for each calendar.  There were a few students who are very involved with BHS Athletics and were willing to shell out $15, but for those not featured in it, or not overly supportive of the athletic office, most were not going to buy one and often expressed surprise at the price tag.  We started to offer a premium 2 for $20 deal to soften the financial blow, but most people are still uninterested.  They only cost us $5.28 to make, so we can continue to lower the price and still make money.  We also broke even today, so every dollar we make from here on out is profit.  We tried to sell calendars before the Boys Basketball game on Friday, but only one person bought one. We are planning on selling on Tuesday before the girls BBall game and use a more aggressive sales strategy.

Tipping Point Blog Post 2

This week in Tipping Point, I read about The Law of the Few.  He talks about Paul Revere's midnight ride.  He had sensational news that spread incredibly quickly by word of mouth.  His main focus, however, is William Dawes, one of Revere's revolutionary friends who had the same news and spree it the same way, but very few people responded to his news nor remembered him.  His news didn't tip because he wasn't a "Connector" and Revere was.  A "Connector" is someone who lots of people  know, respect, and want to please.  In simplest terms, they are popular.  I think this relates to our $200 project because we want to get our calendars in the hands of such "connectors." We want Paul Reveres running down the halls waving a calendar and leading hundreds of students armed with $15 to buy more.  While we don't mind selling to Daweses (non connectors) because $15 is still $15 no matter how connected someone is, it behoves us to have people who know lots of people.  The five of us don't know everyone in the school.  But the five of us know someone who knows some other people and after 2 or three levels, we know everyone in the school.  That means we only have to sell to 10 or so people in order for every person in the school to know someone with a calendar.

C4E Week 2 In Class

The Warrior Calendar $200 project had a momentous week.  We spent the first couple days planning out how we wanted to actually sell the calendars.  We discussed going door to door, but less than 20% of houses actually have school age children in Brookline (and we assumed people with no kids in the school system wouldn't be as inclined to buy a calendar), and its wildly inefficient and tedious.  We also figured that among the 5 of us, we could sell all of them to the BHS community/our families.  They are a perfect last minute and cheap gift idea for students, teachers, and parents.  We planned to have 5-10 on hand every day for the next month or so and to post them on Snapchat (each is seen by 50-80 people) everyday.  We also planned to bring them to games of the week and sell to parents.  We also designed 3 different flyers and posted 100 of them around the school.  We lined every senior hall locker with a flyer to ensure the majority of students saw them once before they got taken down.  For the Storefront project, I created a blueprint for the Foam Home.  I felt that the best way to show what was so special about our cafe was to create a visual outlined with everything that one would see while walking through.  I also created the P+L statement for our first year of business.  Since it required that I use parts 4 and 5 to account for startup costs and COGS, and they had been done without seeing what the other had done, it was interesting to see that our projections had us operating at a loss for much of the time, so we worked to see what costs we could cut back on and what we could do to increase our sales.

C4E Week 1 In Class

This week has been extremely productive for the Foam Home creators and the Warriors Calendar Corporation.  I think that agreeing on the idea of a cafe for the Storefront project early on helped us focus on efforts on more pressing issues of the project (such as brainstorming a fantastic name).  I enjoyed writing the value proposition because it is kind of like a rocket pitch on paper where you have to sell a complex, multilayered idea in as few and easy to understand/get excited about words as you can.  We still have work to do to try to explain and develop our visions so people can see exactly what we plan on doing.  I think it would be a good idea for us to draw a blue print of how we will use the space and visually represent the setup we have in mind.  We also have come up with a phenomenal plan for the $200 project.  Thanks to some incredible timing with a vistaprint sale, our calendar idea is almost guaranteed to make money.  If we had put in the same order but without the 1 week discount, our profit levels would decrease by over 50%.  We only have to sell 1/2 of our product to break even (of course we will do everything we can to sell 100% of them but it is nice for investors to know the risk is low).  The only issue I had with the $200 project is that I couldn't do as much as I wanted to.  Only one person could actually put the calendar together which is why I feel the trello/PR system isn't the greatest. We all went over the Calendar and gave feedback on what should go where but only one person was actually clicking on the photos and putting them into the calendar on the website, so a lot of us felt like our work was not going to be recognized (since there was also only one write up to submit), and putting "gave feedback on calendar" on trello does not make it seem like we put in a lot of work.  Its difficult because you don't want someone to do a lot of work because it looks like others aren't contributing, but it is counterproductive to say "No don't go meet with that person because you already did the write up and it will look like you are doing more than us," especially since meetings frequently go on during free blocks which only one or two members may have.

Tipping Point Blog Post 1

I chose to read Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point," and in this first week of reading, he explains the concept of "Epidemics." I was fascinated by the non-sickness related epidemics that he touches upon, specifically the sudden and meteoric rise if the popularity of Hush-Puppy shoes.  Gladwell hypothesizes that the reason for this unexpected increase is that a small number of highly sociable young New Yorkers started wearing them to hip clubs which made people who saw them decide to buy them too.  Those initial few Hush Puppy enthusiasts were trendsetters whose fashion choices led millions to indirectly copy them.  The reason I found this so interesting was because it is incredibly relevant to Brookline High.  You might be racking your brain to remember whether you've seen students wearing Hush Puppies recently. You may have, if you work on the 4th floor, but the more relevant products are Sperry's and Yoga Pants.  Five years ago, no the only people wearing Sperry's were grandparents with sail boats, and the only people wearing yoga pants were women doing yoga.  Today, I would hazard a guess that upwards of 1,000 BHS students wear one of these products every day.  It got me thinking about who the trendsetters and connectors were who got the fads started.  Were they BHS students or celebrities?  It seems like the latter makes more sense, since people tend to try to copy what they see on TV or whatever their favorite famous person is doing.  But I think that in Sperry's case, it was more of a local fad.  It began when Vineyard Vines became "a thing." At first it was the Vineyard Vine croakies that everyone had on the back of their Ray-bands (thats two more Gladwell-esque epidemics).  Then the male population decided that Frat culture would become the norm and every Vineyard Vines model is on a boat wearing sperry's and voila, mass culture and homogeneity comes to Brookline.  I am not as knowledgeable in the patterns of popularity of yoga pants but I conjecture it has something to do with Lulu Lemon and is more likely to be a result of celebrity influence.