Entry #5

Today was the day that we would start our R&D on the designing of our terrariums. We were each assigned to obtain certain supplies needed for the designing session beforehand and we had to rendezvous at Cheryl's house in the afternoon with the supplies. Ram and I were assigned to obtain the succulent plants, soil and colourful sand. I decided that we would go to Hua Hng Trading Company at Khatib in the morning to obtain our assigned supplies as through my research, they had a cheaper pricing for the soil and colourful sand. We managed to obtain the needed supplies along with several containers that we could use to do our terrariums. For the plants, we chose 15 different succulents and cactus of varying species and colours. With all of these, we took a Grab down to Cheryl's home.

Once we reached Cheryl's home, we had lunch and started on trying out different designs for our terrariums. We had already planned to do two categories of terrariums. The first category was landscape type terrariums in which we would create and showcase various landscapes through our terrariums and customers would be able to choose their own figurines to put into those terrariums and to innovate their own stories in them. We decided to try out this category of terrariums first and we each made our own terrarium.

For my terrarium, I wanted to create a landscape that portrayed the greenness of nature. I chose to put a house in the terrarium to show a house with a beautiful garden. For the plant I used a tall green succulent and I also used artificial flowers.

Somehow, I felt that the green coloured sand that I bought from Hua Hng was quite grainy and it did not look that good. The greenish texture would look so much better if it was more powdery and fine. Another issue that I had with the one I designed was that, the artificial flowers that I used looked real. In a way, it would confuse potential customers on which is the real plant and which is the fake one and that should not happen. These are some of the aspects that should be improved.

The second category of terrariums we wanted to do was terrariums that portrayed fairy tale concepts like Alice in Wonderland or Jack and the Beanstalk. Some of us tried it out but after designing the terrarium, it was really hard to relate it back to the fairy tale especially when we did not have the right figurines for them. We felt that it would not click with potential customers too as they would not be able to identify the terrariums with the fairy tales. Thus, we planned to forgo this concept.

Among the landscape themes, five themes were finalized for our final products. I was glad that my green nature theme was selected as one of the five themes. For the next stage, further improvements must be done to the designing of the terrariums and then we have to go on with mass producing terrariums based on the five themes. Let's hope everything goes smoothly!

With that, this is Shiju, signing out!