Cheryl Entry #11
8th December 2018
With the end of finals, we started discussing about our next event which would be held at OCBC. After Shiju managed to contact the man in charge of the recreational department of OCBC, he arranged for us to go down to recce the place.
Ram and I went down to OCBC Centre (their biggest branch) and we were introduced to the in charge, Alvin. He led us to the south building and brought us to our event space which is located in their recreational room. As he was leading us there, Ram and I started to realize that the crowd was located in their main building while the south building had much fewer people. We visited the area at 12pm, which falls in the 'peak period' of 12pm to 2pm where we are expecting the lunch crowd, and even then the volume of the crowd was worrying.
We were informed that there would be three other vendors occupying the space in the recreational room as well and that terrariums are quite popular among office staff. This good news was dampened by the fact that they actually have terrarium and succulent vendors coming in on a regular basis, which means that these staff may already own terrariums.
Alvin was kind enough to let us choose the area where we want to setup at and we chose the stage area which is directly facing the dining area, has the widest space and has a socket right next to it.
Also, he booked the KTV room for us to store our items inside as we were running the booth for two days.
After the recce was over, Ram and I went to pick up the supplies we needed to make more terrariums on Saturday. Since we had leftover stock from our first event, we only had to make around 40 to hit the total of 100 which was the aim of our event.
Following up from what we mentioned earlier about placing our terrariums in flimsy cardboard boxes, Ram and I had a really difficult time finding a suitable storage container. We went to IKEA and there were many sturdy boxes to hold the terrariums, but most boxes that were wide enough to fit over 30 terrariums were too tall. This is problematic as we planned to stack these boxes such that it would fit the trunk of cars.
This could fit 36 terrariums and has a low height- we got this in the end
It could fit 12 terrariums and it doesn't take up as much surface area
Once again, the whole process began. This time, we bought cactus following feedback from our first event. Cactus are more difficult to handle due to their thorns and we had to buy tongs and gloves to protect ourselves from getting pricked. We also bought a variety of coloured sand from a new supplier to test out the demand for colourful designs. We also followed Roderick's advice on shaking the glass to let the particles settle and this worked much better than our previous notion of compressing the soil to make sure it doesn't move.
At the end of the day, we managed to complete all 100. Despite seeing the event space first hand and realising that the crowd is much smaller than the main building, our team was quite optimistic about the selling them as we believed that our items will stand out more to this target market as compared to the other three vendors who were selling things like mobile accessories.
Our attempt at testing out the corporate market- hoping that all goes well!