Making Money from Kanye West in College
Read Part One
Read Part Two
Read Part Three
Read Part Four
*Pricing*
I had decided that the glasses would be sold for €5 each at the concert. While I thought that we could definitely sell some glasses at €10, I felt only the hard core fans would buy at this price. At €5, I reckoned our product could be considered an impulse buy, something that people could wear to the gig and out that night, but they wouldn't be too bothered if they lost them or they got broken. However I also felt that hardcore fans would pay more than the €5. So I decided to keep a couple of boxes to sell online.
* *
As previously mentioned, the plan was to have four people selling the glasses, me and my business partner (two guys) and then to balance things out we would also hire two girls. We reckoned that if we sold the glasses for 3 hours we would sell out all our stock, to achieve this each seller needed to sell 1 pair every 2.5 minutes. Unfortunately due to circumstances outlined in my previous post in this series, we had not organised the extra staff and so it would be just the two of us selling. Because we were now effectively understaffed by our projections, en route to the gig we agreed that we would be happy if we just broke even, and we would consider the venture a learning experience. To make things worse, we got lost looking for the venue and arrived much later than planned. Luckily for us though, being late is an Irish trait and scores of people were still ambling towards the gig, despite the fact that music could be already be heard emanating from the venue (warm up act). We parked the car quickly, in what turned out to be the only spot on the whole street that was available and was actually pretty close to the entrance. I should mention that on the journey up I spent my time in the passenger seat, opening up boxes of glasses and cutting off all the excess packaging and loading them in to a McWilliams bag.
On the journey!
My job
Our strategy was simple, we would set up near the main entrance with a box in our hands and a bag on our backs with extra stock. We figured this would draw a lot less attention from the police than setting up any type of a stall. So we walked a small bit past the main entrance and it all began! My partner shouted out "Kanye West glasses, 5 euros!", I immediately followed this up with "Get your glow in the dark glasses!" (the name of the tour was the Glow in The Dark Tour). I will NEVER forget the reaction we got, within 20 seconds we were both surrounded by huge groups of teenagers, literally throwing money at us! Peter Drucker once said that when business makes an investment it needs to ask two questions
1. What will happen if the proposed investment fails to produce as promised as do three of every five
2. If the investment is successful - and especially if it is more successful than we expect - what will it commit us to?
While I had been awake at nights contemplating number one, the second question had received less(no) attention, and I immediately realised that I had not purposefully got change to complete transactions with customers. Fortunately I had just about enough in my wallet to get through the first few sales, and after that I was OK( ie. raking in the cash!). It is difficult to describe how busy we both were and because we had no stall there was just people shoving money in my face. At the start I was wearing a pair of the glasses as well, which made things much more difficult because it is impossible to see clearly through them. After around 30 minutes of frantic selling we were running low on stock, so I went back up to the car and reloaded while my partner continued selling. I was so busy that it was only when I got back to the car I realised that I couldn't feel my toes, they were absolutely frozen! This was a problem that I simply didn't have time to deal with, so I just loaded up the bag and walked to the selling point. When I got back Conor informed me that sales had continued unabated and he was almost out. I restocked him and began selling again myself. Shortly after this Kanye began playing, but as stated previously large amounts of people were late for the gig, so there was still a good flow of foot traffic.
Our euphoria at the amazing rate of sales was short lived. Now that the crowd had thinned a bit, it must of become obvious to the police that we were up to something (remember, we had no stall/signs/t-shirts/promotional material or any visible merchandise. So all the Police saw was people walking up to us in droves to hand over money!). So it wasn't exactly surprising that a Policeman approached us and asked us what we were up to. We told him were selling a few glasses and he asked did we have a casual traders license (which you need to sell on the street). I had been kind of expecting this and had decided that should this occur, we would act in a meek manner and feign any knowledge of requiring a license, which is exactly what we did. The cop told us we had two options, either go to the police station or go home. We acquiesced, thanked him for not reporting us and the three of us began trudging back, us towards our car and the cop to the concert. At this stage we had sold slightly more than was required to break even, were extremely cold, and content with the relative success of our first enterprise.
to be continued...
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