Hi everyone! Happy New Year… for those of you who weren’t at the meeting about the shop in Afflecks here’s an update.
We had a meeting with Marcus and have booked the shop from 1st – 14th Feb – If we decide it has been successful and want to continue or re-open the shop later on this is also possible.
We would like EVERYONE to contribute products to sell in the shop – obviously make your products as cheaply as possible but remember they are going to be bought by real people for real money so do need to be good quality as well!
You can make anything you like but it’s probably best to concentrate on things similar to what is already sold in Afflecks eg. clothing, crafty things, gifts etc. If you are stuck for ideas on what to make, make Valentines Day themed things as the shop closes on the 14th!
On Tuesday 12th, after the Journal hand in, we are taking a school trip to Afflecks to have a look at the space for those of you who haven’t seen it. I went to see it when it was being used by the another course just to check out how they were doing things….
As you can see they have done the shop up really nicely but all that will be there when we arrive is the till and two tables so we’re gonna have to sort some stuff out. The location is also quite terrible – it’s basically through another shop so you wouldn’t know it was there at all. What they have done is continued the dotted lines on the wall out of the space and out towards the stairs that lead onto Oldham Street but I didn’t notice them until I was on my way out so I think if we did something like that it would have to be a lot more noticeable. Secondly, the products they were selling were pretty pricey and the girl I was talking to reckoned that was why they’d not sold very much. They also only had 5 different ranges of products in there – they ran the whole project as a Dragon’s Den type thing where they had to pitch their products to their tutors and they decided what went in, so I think for them it was more about the experience of running a business whereas for us it’s all about the money at the end of the day. To help out with the problem with the location I think it would be good if we had a Facebook group for the shop and all products could be photographed properly to make people come and buy.
In the meeting we also decided that Thursday would be our meeting day and on Thursday 14th (1st Thurs back) there will be a meeting regarding the shop layout and what we’re going to do about bags, price tags and all the other little bits. – We also need to sort out a rota for running the shop at some point.
Possible deadline for finished products is Thursday 28th January – I thought this might be a good date for everyone to bring in their products so we can all look at what everyone has made, get an idea of how things need to be displayed and how much room they are going to take up, decide on prices and photograph the products. – Would anyone like to be photographer and put sort out a Facebook group by the way? Then we could have Friday and Saturday to set up the shop ready for Monday. I don’t know if this is leaving it a bit late, what do people think?
