Fone Chic

Over the last few months, Young Enterprise students were set with the task of creating and developing a product and business by selling a product of their choice. Fone Chic decided to make and design personalised phone cases with the intention of raising money for charity while additionally developing personal skills.

As well as promoting our product on the school’s website and social media, Fone Chic displayed many posters around the school and approached individual teachers and form groups to get our product out there and show our first prototype in person. We felt that this built a relationship with our customers as they could envision themselves with our product.

Once an order was placed, we received an email with the details of their order specifications, which was then registered into a spreadsheet ready for production. Then a member of our team would tailor the product to the customers’ liking at the end of each week. Shortly after being manufactured, the phone cases were then packaged and ready for distribution, which were hand-delivered by members of Fone Chic.

We achieved a total profit of £277, after paying back the initial loan from the Peter Jones Foundation. This was donated to our chosen charity, the Lily Foundation, which we felt is a charity close to many of us. With our profit margin being so high, we placed fifth nationally within the Tycoon Young Enterprise competition. This profit was the result of 38 sales within the school community and 100% customer satisfaction.

Fone Chic would highly recommend this experience to any dedicated, innovative, and creative minds that are interested in pursuing an entrepreneurial future. After this valuable opportunity, we will walk away with many newly developed skills that will help us in the future with whatever path we will embark on.

Synth Notebooks

Our notebooks were available through WisePay for £4.49 in a wide range of designs and paper types. We sold both marble and camouflage designs with the choice of lined, squared or plain paper which we promoted in our poster advertisements around school. Our unique option to allow the customer to both customise the design and paper type created twice as much choice for them to suit their needs.

We raised our funds by compiling a business plan detailing our business and its operation to receive our loan from Young Enterprise which funded our start-up. Throughout the course of the trading window, we managed to sell a total of 39 notebooks which then turned into a profit of £99.06.

Processing orders required a lot of attention to ensure we could fill our order forms as fast as possible to reduce the waiting time for our buyers. Once the orders arrived, they were delivered via the tutor trays for a hassle-free delivery. As of now we are no longer operating and selling our notebooks since the closure of the trading window.

From this experience, we learned fundamental business skills such as time management, how to calculate sales and how to make a product stand out through promotional content and activity. We would recommend it to anyone interested in running a business so that they may also learn the skills needed to operate a successful business.

If we were to change how we operated our business, we would have included tutor groups in our order forms as not knowing the tutor groups of some customers delayed delivery times. The success of our business has created a discussion in the group about whether we would like to continue operating the business now that we are able to be more independent and utilise our newfound creative freedom with the business from now on.

Thank you all for supporting our business throughout the trading window.