REFLECTION- LEARNING LAUNCH

Francisco Parra

Challenge

I am a Business major student and, recently, one of my projects was to entrepreneur an online  business. My team and I decided to develop the ideas around a pet shop that sells accessorizes  and costumes for dogs and cats designed by us. On last October we started the meetings to  organize the activities; our challenge was to start operations by December 2020, and that our  products had to be successfully sold, we had to present results at our project manager. The  resources that we had were limited (financial specifically) so we wanted to be sure that our  investments were not to be wasted. Therefore we focused on looking for the products that would  gave us more profits considering that our products were going to be manufactured by us, we  needed to know the combination of products that would gave us the highest profits.

Selection

Since we wanted to know the successfully products, all of us realized that the only way was to  started sealing different accessorizes in small quantities. As a result of our reflections, we decided  that using the learning launch tool to make different experiments by sell small combination  products.

Application

For the first learning launch the products that we put on sale were all designed and manufactured  by our team. At first we had some messages asking for them and their prices but only a couple of  them were reflected in request. Even though our sales were not a lot, we face difficulties on the  shipment costs; sometimes it was more expensive than the product price. The learning launch let  us discovered that this issue was an important impediment for people to order. As a small  business some of the directions of delivery were too far and the costs were expensive to afford  them.

For the second learning launch, we decided to offer less designs but on more sizes, so on the  manufacturing area we focused on specific designs and guaranty the quality that we wanted to  maintain. We saw a solution for the problem with de shipment costs by increase the price of each  product; with this strategy we can apportion that cost on all the products: no matter where you  live, shipment is free.

Insight

By applying this tool we discovered not only the correct mix of products that give us the highest  amount of profit, it also showed other different problems on areas such as delivery, manufacturing  and quality.

We had troubles with the result of the experiments, even though it helped us, some of us still  believed that some of our products were the best idea to sell, even though the costumers didn’t  had the same opinion. It was hard to accept that sometimes the ideas that you appreciate the  most are not the profitable ones. The hardest part was to opening our minds to make changes to

our original plan; the results made us realized that it was too early to develop many of our ideas.  The business is steel in the initial phase, we decided to keep operating with the second experiment  information, and it is working well until today. Soon we want to put in practice another  experiment with brand new products to expand the offer to our customers.

Approach

We were able to obtain relevant information as a result; it can be said that we choose the correct  tool. The success of the application of the tool depends not only on developing experiments, but  also making a mind preparing to appreciate and evaluate the results objectively. Therefore,  practice will make us use the tool efficiently and makes us feel more comfortable developing  experiments.

