For several years I had promised my children that would set up a garage stall to sell their old clothes and toys. The plans each year became more elaborate with their desire to sell home made lemonade, cupcakes and even do some face painting. Unfortunately (fortunately!), we ended up donating our old items to friends before we were able to run the stall, so when school were looking for volunteers to run stalls at the summer fayre, I entered the kids in.
Finally, there was a natural opportunity to start introducing my primary school children to some entrepreneurship which I was excited about… albeit I was not ready for the amount of work involved!
Step 1: What shall we sell on the stall?
A lot of ideas were thrown into the bag by the children. Some seemed good (but hard to execute) whilst others did not seem viable. We made the decision to sell a few different items on our stall to capture varying purchasing powers. The key item was a homemade body scrub – this was the highest priced item. Alongside this we had Christmas cards made by our friend Rhea Talwar of Perfectly Imperfect Prints as well as decorated stones and shell necklaces (both low value items).
Step 2: What is the cost of the items?
The real learning came in at this stage. After writing out a list of all the items we would need to buy, we then had to go through and put a cost against each item. This was not too hard for the eldest to understand, however we determined we would need to cut out several things like purchasing bags for the items to keep costs down and ensure we were not cutting into our profit margin. Several items were easy to determine such as where we would buy the ingredients for the body scrub. What was a struggle was to reduce the cost of the jar that the body scrub would be presented in. The cost was £1 per jar, which was good however it still made up a significant amount of the total cost of the product. We were not able to bulk buy on this occasion due to the small number we were making.
Step 3: What does our profit margin need to be?
This was the most important stage of the planning and something that took a while for the children to understand. Initially when I asked, “How much shall we charge for the body scrub?” a price was given to me that was under the total cost of producing it. After explaining why we could not go that low (as we needed to cover our costs and look to make some profit), we slowly increased the price until we reached a price where we would have a 30% profit margin. We thought this was fair.
Step 4: Making the items
We made all the items at home. The children were fully part of this process, being responsible for measuring, mixing and filling the body scrubs in the jar. I was optimistic at this point around their commitment to the stall.
Step 5: Running the stall
Ahead of running the stall, we created a sales chart so that we could mark off every item we sold. We had a float of change to allow for cash payments and being able to give the right change. We did realise that with so many people now paying by contactless that we were at a disadvantage not having a card payment terminal.
On the day, the stall was hard work! We were on the stall for four hours. We sold several body scrubs but not as many as we hoped. Despite having smaller value items for 50p to £1, which we thought would all be sold, hardly any were. It did make us think how we could better have planned the stall for the target market (school children). It seemed like if we had a lucky dip, or some interaction games then this would have been more appealing.
Step 6: Tallying up.
The result: Our stall turned a net profit of £50. This was great to achieve, and the plan now is to reinvest this profit into the next venture or idea and see if we can make it grow further. It was great to go through the whole process to understand what is involved.
