After some delay with Daniel's Imprinting, we finally got our T-shirt order in!  We are not too satisfied with this imprinting place as they told us that the T-Shirts would definitely be in by Wednesday, but come Wednesday, they weren't there.  They said they'd be in Thursday and would call when they got in, but we never received a call.  On Friday, we called them and after being transferred to about 5 different people, we were finally notified that our shirts were in!  We went to pick them up and were able to begin selling them immediately!  I (Rachel) was the first one to buy a shirt and help our cause of donating to Sandy victims!  I wish we had more time to sell these shirts, but we will sell as much as we can in the next couple of days.  We have made a Facebook page of our product as another channel with which to sell our product.  We wish this class didn't have to end so soon, especially when we just got our order in, but we are looking forward to doing as much as we can in the next couple days!  As for the design of the shirts, they gave us two options to choose from.  We all unanimously decided on the second one as the better design.

So we went to Daniel's Imprinting Shop on University Boulevard and made our order for the t-shirts!!  This is a basic design of what the shirts will look like except they are short sleeve.  We wanted to go with a basic natural-looking color to go along with the "Hurricane Sandy" name.  This design was originally supposed to go on the back, but it was a lot more expensive to print on both the front and back, so we decided that a front design would be better. We are planning to sell these shirts for $15, so the more profit that can go to us, and to Hurricane Sandy victims, the better.  By going to one side and changing brands, we got the price per shirt reduced from around $9.37 to $5.87 which we are very happy about!  We ordered, 10 each of small, medium, and large, and ordered 5 XL, totaling 35 shirts.  We wanted to start relatively small because we can always buy more if we need to.  We will definitely get them in the week after Thanksgiving break, which is great!  We will get an invoice of the shirt in an email tomorrow, so we will just have to approve it before they can begin printing!  We are very excited to start this second part of out venture and are looking forward to selling!

After Hurricane Sandy hit, we felt that there was a new need for us to work towards.  Therefore, we decided to sell T-shirts and donate half of the profits to benefit the victims of Hurricane Sandy.  We will donate to the American Red Cross which is doing a lot to help the people who lost everything.  Our group member, Bill, is from New Jersey and his neighborhood was hit really hard by the storm, so this venture is very important to all of us.  We feel that since a lot of people at JMU were affected by the storm, this new direction will appeal to a lot of students here.  Bill is working on a design for our t-shirts and we will hopefully bring to an imprinting shop soon.  We hope to have our shirts available for selling when we get back from Thanksgiving break.  

  Mercy House continues to serve only families with dependent children and maintain focus on building and strengthening family unity. By teaching families about the importance of living and working together, each individual has the support that enables them to reach his or her highest potential.  Our motto is “Changing the world one family at a time.” We see the positive outcomes of change through our residents and we know that our neighborhood is a better, safer and more prosperous community because families have been given a chance to grow and improve their way of life.  

Website: http://themercyhouse.org/

We just had our meeting with Mercy House and it was very successful!  We were talking about ideas so we could potentially set up a one-for-model where we sell one product on campus and donate one product to the Mercy House.  The manager, Twila Lee, had the idea that we could sell scarves and gloves for the upcoming winter.  We think this would be a good product that we can transition to for the coming winter.  She recommended that we should look into a local imprinting shop called Market.  She says they can probably order the scarves and gloves for us and put our logo on it as well as the Mercy House's logo.  She says that they might be likely to give us a discount since we are now affiliated with the Mercy House.  We were thinking that they could put their logo on the product as well to get their name out there.  Twila also told us that the Mercy House is affiliated with two different thrift stores in Harrisonburg and that we can sell our products there.  She gave us the information of the person who runs those stores, so we will contact him immediately. We believe that these will be great distribution channels for us so that we can reach a greater market than just JMU students.  We will also be allowed to sell our left-over sunglasses there so we will set that up as soon as possible.  Our meeting with Mercy House went extremely well and we are so excited to have a new partner in this venture!

Saturday, October 6. Our first MVP launch! We went out and began selling our first order of sunglasses. We were able to sell 12 pairs in an hour and a half at $8 a pair. The order cost us $52 for 24 pairs. After our first day of selling we were profitable! We were able to raise $37 for the American Cancer Society from 50% of our profits and donations we accepted. It was an awesome experience for us. 


Sunday, October 7. We sold four more pairs of sunglasses to friends and friend of friends.

Monday, October 8. We met to go over our business model, customer discovery interviews, customer archetypes, and debrief on our first day of sales. We discovered that our customers could be broken into four segments:

                        - Adults/parents that bought a pair of sunglasses for themselves.

                        - Adults/parents that bought sunglasses for their kids, or for other people. 

                        - Students who wanted to buy the sunglasses for themselves, because they liked                                          them and the purpose behind our company.

                        - Students who seemed to only like our sunglasses because their parents were                                               buying a pair for them or were pressured into getting a pair by their                                                               parents. 

            - The student segment who wanted a pair for themselves because they liked the sunglasses and/or                   the purpose behind our company is the most important segment for us. It is our and most accessible               market segment for us. This segment will be our primary focus in future sales, because the parent                   market was exaggerated thanks to family weekend. 

            - In our business model our primary weakness is our partners. We still do not have a  charity that we                 can work with in more ways than simply just sending them a check to   them of the money we raised.  We want a charity that we are able to directly work with and see the effects of that our contributions are making. That way we are able to show  our customers that their support makes a difference.  We want to create something that matters and not just throw money at a problem that a charity is trying to solve. 

            - When we presented our model to members of each team in class we mentioned our problem with not being able to find a charity that we could directly work with. Everyone we talked to suggested                         helping a local charity in Harrisonburg and using that to differentiate ourselves from all of the                         organizations that support national and global charities. This was a new idea to us and we decided                 to test this idea in our next round of customer interviews.

            - After class we placed an order for 48 more sunglasses from our supplier. This order included 24                     pairs just like our previous order along with a dozen aviators and a dozen vintage girl pairs. Our first 24 pairs were just the universal wayfarer style and could be worn by anyone. For our next order we wanted to experiment and see if different styles  would work, because the wayfarer style is also the same style organizations give to  people for free with their logo or something on them. We chose the two styles after asking over 20 customers, and all the members of teams that talked to us in class today.  This new order cost us $122 dollars. We paid extra shipping to ensure we would get the new order before the next football games. We doubled our order to try to have enough inventory to last us more than just one week. 

Wednesday, October 10. We contacted Mercy house about partnering with us as our new local charity. We decided to switch to a local charity, because they will be more willing to work with us and more appreciate of our work for them. Mercy House also has a thrift store that we could possibly put our products in and give us a new way of distributing our products. We chose Mercy House, because we had heard how they are very accepting and willing to work with those who support their cause. Learn more about Mercy House by visiting: http://themercyhouse.org/

Friday, October 12. Our new order of sunglasses arrived! We are now in the whole again, but have 56 pairs of sunglasses in our inventory. We are excited for our second big day of selling tomorrow. It will also be our first day of selling multiple styles. 


Saturday, October 13. Football game number two and our second big day of selling! We were able to sell 20 pairs of sunglasses. This took out the rest of inventory from the first order, along with 12 pairs from our second order. This order all of our charity funds will go to the American Cancer Society, because that is what we told our customers it was going towards. When we were selling today we continued to use the American Cancer Society, because that was what Rachel chose to say and we wanted to keep it straight which charity it was going towards. The money we raise for our second order will still go towards the American Cancer Society, because of the way we are splitting our profits between us and our charity. Our next order will be our first order raised completely for Mercy House, We are excited to work with a local charity where we can see what our contributions' are going towards.

     After selling 12 pairs of our second order we are only $26 away from being profitable off of that order. We still have 36 pairs remaining order which if we sell all of them at $8 a pair will put us at over $200 in revenue! We hope to sell the rest of inventory before the next home football game on October 27. We expect to do this by selling on campus at the commons on campus.

Here's a picture of us selling our sunglasses before the JMU and William & Mary football game. We made 18 sales this day!

50/50 is a social entrepreneurship experiment we began for our Management 372 Entrepreneurship class at James Madison University. For each pair of sunglasses we sell we will donate 50% of the profits to a non-profit charity or foundation. We are trying to partner with a non-profit program that supports cancer research. We are also looking into other organizations and causes to support. As well as looking at different types of products to sell to support the 50/50 movement at JMU.

Wednesday, September, 26. We had our first board meeting with the class on. We posted our feedback in an earlier blog. The feedback was discouraging and contradicted a lot of information we had gathered from 20 prior customer interviews. The board meeting almost made us decide to pivot and do something completely new.

Friday, September 28. We decided to continue with our original plans to order sunglasses to sell before the football game on family weekend October 6th. If this is successful and validates our customer interviews than we plan to continue pursuing our current business model. However, if the sunglasses launch flops and validates the concerns that were brought up by the investors in the board meeting, then we will be willing to pivot. 

Monday, October 1. After class, Bill and Ethan, went on an adventure  to the RMH cancer center to meet about using them as the cancer organization we donate 50% of our profits to. Neither one of us drove to class that day so we had to walk back to Ethan's apartment to get his car. So our first official obstacle we had to overcome was climbing up the massive Port Republic hill together! We were given the contact information of the general manager of the cancer center and we tried to get in touch with her. 

Wednesday, October 3. We had yet to hear back from the cancer center.  A little disheartened we began looking into other non-profit organizations, charities, or foundations we could partner with to donate our 50% of our profits to. After class, Bill and Ethan went on another adventure around campus in order to get us approved to sell on campus. This adventure was a 100% success and we are now able to officially sell on Saturday at the football game. Rachel went home and finished the data collection spreadsheet of our board meeting results. The results of the board meeting are still disappointing but after more customer discovery interviews giving us positive feedback we feel like our company is moving in the right direction. However, we still have a lot to do, discover, measure, and learn from. 

 
Friday, October 5. Our first order of sunglasses arrived! Now we have our actual product ready to sell tomorrow. Get excited!