Tipping Point Blog Post 5

This week in Tipping Point, Gladwell explores the Air Walk shoes.  Immediately I drew a connection to the Case Study we read and responded to in class.  The two cases are strikingly similar.  The air walk shoes appealed to hipsters and the mainstream alike by releasing products that were distinctly aimed at each group, they were able to appease two vastly different segments of consumers.  "Early Adopters" in southern California were beach loving skateboarders who were the initial targets of the company, but they didn't just buy them, they translated them.  This group of highly specialized people leveled, sharpened, and assimilated the product to make it popular in the mainstream as well.  Airwalk realized it had just expanded its reach to potential buyers and through segmentation was able to please the masses.  As it reached its highest point of success however, it switched strategies and made its products more wholesale centric.  With nothing specialized, different, or unique, it lost the key component that made it popular in the first place.  It was then no different from a major retailer, and was no longer "cool." This is almost exactly what my proposal for James was in the case study.  I thought it would be best to separate the cupcake company into an artisan entity for small scale, boutique sales, and then a larger segment for huge production of less intricate products.  The problem for Airwalks was that they decided to release one product and hope that it would please both types of people based on name value alone.  It failed miserably, as it probably would for the cupcake company because once you sell your soul to the devil (wholesale), your product becomes nothing but a price tag with a cost to make that they drive as low as possible without regard to the integrity of it.  I think segmentation also is not a good long term solution however, as the vast majority of the time one part is hugely more successful than the other and it ends up a disaster for the company as a whole (see Netflix).

C4E Week 6 In Class

This week during class the Foam Home mainly focused on creating our presentation.  I put together an initial version of our powerpoint with a heavy focus on visuals.  While it may have looked good, because our projects is heavily numbers based it didn't give the viewer a better understanding of our vision.  After meeting with our consultants and going through an initial run through of our presentation we realized we still had a lot of work to do.  We went back to the drawing board and created a variety of graphs and charts to emphasize the most important figures in our financial documents.  We also heeded our consultants advice on the importance of buzzwords.  We chose 3 or 4 of the adjectives we most wanted associated with the Foam Home and implemented them into as many of our slides as we could.  We settle on "student-centric," "collaboration," and "comfortable" as our main descriptions, but also worked on making sure that the parts of our vision that made it unique were also repeated and made clear.  The computer lab and conference rooms are an integral part of what sets the Foam Home apart, so we wanted to make sure those two features were well documented.  While our $200 project winds down to a close, we are wringing out the calendars for all they are worth.  Since every dollar we make is profit, we are selling them for really anything we can get our hands for.  I sold a few for $5 (we ordered them at around $4.50 a piece so the return isn't that bad).  It was probably a mistake to reach out for the extra funding at the beginning of the project as we are now left with a large number of boxes with products that will be worthless pretty soon.

Tipping Point Blog Post 4

This week in Tipping Point Gladwell talks about how lifestyle, background, and culture influence the success of an individual.  He uses Jewish immigrants from the turn of the century as his prime examples.  These immigrants, he explains, came to the country with nothing except a little bit of know-how in the clothing industry.  Through hard work and sacrifice, they achieve a modicum of   success, and were able to give their children an education.  These men and women who sacrificed everything when coming to the new world are not Gladwell's focus, however.  Its those they sacrificed everything for who he believes are the key to understanding success.  He explains that these children grew up watching their parents sweat and toil to put dinner on the table, and thus they adopted this determination and applied it to their educations (which their parents had not obtained).  This hard work combined with the declining birth rate during the depression (less competition to get into schools) got them into good colleges.  When few firms were hiring jewish lawyers, they started their own and took cases that were deemed unfit for "whit-shoe" firms (such as corporate takeovers) which eventually uber profitable.  It seemed to me that these lawyers were not so much skilled as they were lucky.  The only reason they were able to take the (unforeseen) lucrative hostile corporate takeover cases was that no one else wanted them, and not because they were incredibly good at their jobs.  It is an interesting case of people casting a product or idea away as unfit for high brow society, but later accepting it when it becomes trendy.  The first thing it made me think about was ripped jeans.  Twenty years ago, if your jeans had holes in them, you threw them out and bought new ones.  It was a simpler time.  Now, however, you can pay $200 and companies will save you the trouble and rip them for you before you ever put them on.  The jeans themselves didn't get better at being jeans, but society evolved (devolved?) to a place where a certain style became trendy or exciting, much like corporate takeovers.

C4E Week 5 In Class

This week in class as we prepared our Foam Home documents to send to Mr. Gladstone we noticed a few errors in our startup costs.  While they didn't effect our P+L statements were minuscule in total, it got me thinking about what would happen in the real world if this happened.  While I do not take the Legal Studies class, I do know that the falsification of financial documents is a big no-no.  I also know that humans are prone to err and wondered how often companies over/underestimate their own figures and get in trouble.  Blue chip companies that deal with millions of dollars on a daily basis are constantly under the scrutiny of the SEC and the media, so they must be incredibly careful with every number that gets inputted into a spreadsheet.  While we at the Foam Home were able to catch our mistake before the cops were at our doors, the necessity of double checking figures is a good lesson to learn early on in the entrepreneurship process.  As we begun to put together our presentation, it forced us to rethink what exactly our vision was and why that vision is unique.  Since there is another coffee shop proposal, I think it is important for us to distance ourselves from a stereotypical café, and figure out a way to represent the Foam Home as a space for shared learning experiences.  For the $200 project, we devised a new strategy to sell the remaining calendars.  Last week we attempted to make bulk sales at discounted prices, but unfortunately there were very few interested groups.  This week we decided to go back to the basics of 1 on 1 sales.  We found the people who had shown interest in the product (especially those featured in it) at first but were hesitant about the price and attempted to convince them to buy with the incredible sale being offered.  While it didn't work every time it was encouraging to find more buyers and hopefully continue to make profit slowly but surely now that we have fully paid Kyle back.