Author Archive
Shipment 2 ready for delivery!
Posted on: March 1, 2012
The second shipment of purchased kits is out for delivery today.
And we’ve filmed our demo video. Posting soon to website.
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
- Parents are interested in 1 time purchase and paying subscription for additional content.
- 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:
- Parents want subscriptions! Take the work out of it for them.
- 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.
Is it a single childhood experience? A revered role model? How can we combine these experiences into the experience we are providing?
We surveyed 61 people, 44 of whom were women, between the ages of 18 and 59. The majority were engineers. We found respondents through posting to social media groups (Facebook and LinkedIn), sharing from our own accounts, and emailing old classmates.
We asked 6 questions. The first 4 were multiple choice and intended to collect general information (gender, age, field in STEM, and # parents in STEM). Surprisingly, more than half our respondents had neither parent involved in STEM and about a third had only their father in STEM.
The last two questions were intended to gather information about formative childhood experiences that pushed these people into STEM and the decision to stay in STEM in higher education.
We chose to focus on the answers from our female respondents. Some common themes/responses:
- Introduction to STEM by parents at very young age.
- Playing with their dads.
- Middle school and high school classes that they excelled in.
- School science competitions, museums
- Childhood curiosity got them hooked at a young age – connections to the real world.
Conclusions:
- Provide STEM involved role models to the kids without parents or close family friends involved in STEM.
- Pursue involvement with schools. Target science classes and competitions and get higher female involvement.
- Provide the opportunity for more girls to have those discovery moments and experiences.
Sourcing from China
Posted on: February 21, 2012
In order to determine pricing for the wider product range, we can start with our first product, the car kit.
We assume we will have 5 different products, distributed among 5 different difficulty levels. For the purposes of this analysis, we assign the car kit to the base price. As we decide relative complexity of the other products in the line, we can adjust the sourcing cost to reflect additional (or fewer) parts.
Approach 1:
Buy prepackaged car kits directly from China, and pay extra for customization.
Listed prices:
I also corresponded directly with suppliers in China, and got similar pricing:
Approach 2:
Source most of the components off the shelf from China, have a supplier there combine them into a kit. Option to custom design some parts. There will be additional costs for assembling kits together, as well as additional minor components that have been changing with each design iteration. Costs of decorations are also not included.
Important components:
- The experience. I think that us being there and having parents actively engaged makes such a huge difference in the experience. At least for the first experience, where the girls can learn how to do these things in a safe environment, for support when they encounter something completely new and might be confused. Also, they were clearly enjoying the energy of being around other girls. What that means for our business model – at least in the short term, holding classes and events like these. A mom in the first session asked when and where our next event would be. We could get our name out there more, and build up positive experience for these girls.
- Girls LOVED that when they finished a certain task, they got to collect a badge. For the first badge some of them didn’t really get why they were getting them (we should have explained better), but seeing the others get a badge, they got excited about it and were lining up to get each new badge. One dad asked us if he could get more badges for his daughter upstairs.
- Having the pig out on the table, and letting them play with it before they worked multiplied the decoration time by so much. In previous testing, decoration took maybe 10 minutes tops – in the first session today, they spent a half hour on decoration until they had to leave. In the second session, we went an extra hour over time. Definitely more inspiration for the girls as all but 1 were making animals. They like having some direction to go in, and having a gallery of possible ideas (submitted by other kids too) would really get them thinking. Really exciting range of creations today.
- Something as simple as letting them pick between two or three colors for a sash or a badge we got strong opinions from the girls, putting them in control of these little decisions made them feel important.
Colorwheel Toys 