Entry #4

It was a hectic week!

There were lots of submissions!! Amidst all the sleepless nights, we finally submitted and presented Frond business plan. We presented Frond’s core product as capturing and evoking the memories and imaginations of our customers with 2 main themes, fictional stories and landscape.

Fictional Stories: Recreate stories like Fairy Tales, that have been ingrained in the memory of our customers

Landscapes: Allows customers to relive their cherished moments through selecting figurines that best portray their beloved memories.

The main questions during the Q&A were mainly on how we were trying to sell our business idea on a personalized memory as customization is costly and there will not be economies of scale. Our positioning on “affordability” does not really makes sense too if we want to provide quality service. We will think through these questions carefully and make amendments to our business concept if required.

Today, we met to try out sample designs for our terrariums as we plan to participate in a popup booth in November. In the morning, each of us went to different places to purchase the materials required before meeting up at Cheryl’s house. As this was only a trial, the costs of our materials were relatively much higher. We could definitely save much more if we were to buy everything through our suppliers and in large quantities.

We applied what we had learnt during the workshop but improvised by making it an open jar terrarium, used succulent plants and used coloured sand. Planting was still the biggest challenge as we had to be cautious of breaking the roots.

This was what I had created:

I had brought my stash of DIY materials over in hopes that it would be of great help to us. And it did! Never knew the things I bought long ago could be so helpful and handy now.

Some of us incorporated the alphabet beads into our terrarium by putting our names down. And it was a great idea indeed as it makes the terrarium more unique to oneself.

We made a total of 13 different terrariums (many done by Cleo!), in a few different glass designs.

At the end of the day, we sat down for a meeting where we discussed on how and what we should do from there on.

We had decided to scrap the idea of fictional stories as we find that figurine of the characters are key factor to make the story come alive which does not seem plausible as there may be issues regarding intellectual property.

We shortlisted 5 different landscape concept, and plan to use them next time. Ram’s terrarium particularly stood out for me as the design was distinct and the way he placed his alphabet beads were really nice! We decided to adopt the idea of the personalization of name as an optional product where customers can add-on to their terrarium.

A productive and fulfilling day it was!

Till the next post!

Jia Xin