Colorwheel Toys

FinalPres_finalupdate

We went back to the local high school we previously visited to interview girls that were involved in STEM activities. We asked them about their after school activities, teaching/tutoring experience, jobs, what they did for fun, and would they be interested in working for our company as “Mary Kay” representatives. We told them that working for our company would involve hosting birthday parties, after school activities, and summer camps. We spoke to five girls in total. All the girls were really excited about our idea and all said that they would love to work for us.

Key Learnings:

• High schoolers are really busy. A job that would let them work flexible, and not too many, hours,  really appealed to the girls.
• Some of them already work at summer camps. 
• The science summer camps in the area are always looking for more educational content. We should consider selling our product/learning modules/experience to them. 
• Some school groups try to do outreach to local elementary schools,by volunteering, and have a hard time organizing the activities. We could consider partnering with these groups.
• One of the girls already hosted an impromptu birthday part for a friend’s sibling. Therefore, this is a pretty good idea for high school girls.

The second shipment of purchased kits is out for delivery today.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

And we’ve filmed our demo video. Posting soon to website.

e245 week7 final

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

On Saturday, we hosted an open session in the Children’s Creativity Museum’s (CCM) innovation lab for two hours. Parents and kids were free to wander in and out. A few of the parents mentioned they had seen us announced through the CCM’s mailing list or website. Others were just at the museum for the day.

We used the session to talk to parents and gain insights into revenue hypotheses and presentation of our website.

They hypotheses were as follows

1. Parents are interested in 1 time purchase and paying subscription for additional content.
2. Good, better, and best product offerings increase sales.

After interviewing 12 parents, which included asking direct questions and letting them interact with the website, we came to the following conclusions:

1. Parents want subscriptions! Take the work out of it for them.
2. Inconclusive

Additional notes:

Opportunity for partnership with the museum store. We can train teens to host these events in the future, driving parents to the museum store to purchase our products.

As we’ve found that experience trumps product, we are working on learning about new channels and different methods through which the experience can be made more scalable. Multi-level marketing (MLM) is a possibility, with a slight Colorwheels twist to it. MLM is a person-to-person marketing strategy that runs off of relationship referrals and word-of-mouth. In other words, salespeople can use their connections to make sales.

Our idea on how to use MLM is to train high school girls to run these workshops that have been successful for us. These workshops will replicate the experience and can be held in museums, after school programs, summer camps, etc. This also follows a previous learning that girls like teaching others. These workshops would then provide an outlet for sales to take place by having our kit on hand for parents to purchase after the sessions. Furthermore, this would be cost-effective as we could even have this be an extracurricular activity for girls to fulfill volunteer hours on top of padding their resume.

Another possibility is to find moms who share our vision and would be interested in running these types of groups to follow the girl scout model. It would be similar to having a girl scout system except the girls learn STEM instead! In a previous session at the Children’s Creativity Museum, we have already seen girls love the idea of receiving badges for reaching certain milestones.

We are still determining the scalability of these ideas. We have started by talking to a couple teachers about our idea who we hope will recommend some students they believe would be interested in this type of work.

One of the ways we have been investigating our business model is by going into toy stores and seeing what people buy. We visited an awesome toy store in Los Altos that also sells teaching supplies to see what they had. Their science kits section was very well stocked, and the employee I spoke to was very proud of the fact that they carried toys that were hard to find in other places.

Key Learnings:

• Science kits frequently bought as default gifts for birthday parties.
• The age range is usually somewhere between 6 and 10 years old
• Parents judge kits based on their packaging and whether they look too cheap (see attached photos for and example of popular packaging)
• Generally teachers just buy stencils, workbooks, and art supplies from them. Some science kits that they carry can be used for classroom activities but not that many.
• Some popular toys are gearations (see attached photo) and building sets with magnets in them (magnatiles, tegu)
• The Science kit area is very crowded and it will be hard to differentiate our product.

  This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We had a meeting this morning with the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. The foundation is focused on getting children, right now mostly middle school but expanding into elementary school, ready for college and careers. They are doing this by running several programs, the most notable of which is the step up to algebra program. An intensive multi-week, 4 hour a day, program that brings kids up to speed in algebra and raises their confidence in their own abilities.

One interesting aspect of their organization is that they measure the attitude of the kids before and after the program and find very positive gains. This will be an interesting direction for us to explore for use as a metric. They’ve obtained good results using this metric. The tests were designed in conjunction with a professor at Santa Clara University.

Additionally, they’ve invited us to an event for middle school teachers to work on design thinking in designing math/science curricula. We’ll also, hopefully, be able to connect with more elementary schools through them.

It was a great visit and very nice to hear about an organization that is working on helping prepare kids for college and getting them excited about their abilities in STEM.

e245 week6