Get Rich or Blog Trying.....: March 2010

Get Rich in College Blog

Making Money From Kanye West in College (Finale)

So....we had sold just about enough glasses to breakeven, were dreadfully cold and tired, and had just had our first confrontation with the law. We were happy enough to go home when...just as the cop was leaving us and we were about to troop home, my partner in a moment of brilliance, offered the Policeman a pair of the glasses, he shrugged them off (But must of concluded that we were harmless amateurs) because he then said

"F*ck it, sure stay there if you want, its too cold for this sh!t."

We thanked him profusely and launched back in to our task with renewed vigour. Soon enough I was going back to the car to restock with the last of our merchandise. For the final bit of stock we were required to use a bit more selling techniques because traffic was much quieter and would come in groups, where generally, none of them bought, or all of them did! By now I was nearly perished with the cold (my partner had a ski jacket) and offered a couple of deals on the last few pairs. Eventually we were left with one pair of glasses (the ones I'd been wearing on my head, and we decided to hang on to these as a memento. The whole night passed like a blur, the response we got was simply amazing, we were more successful than either of us could of imagined (remember, in last post I pointed out we were happy to break even), with just the two of us we had managed to sell all our merchandise despite arriving late and having no promotional gear. The merchandise cost us $400 for 300 pairs(bought wholesale online). We sold 250 shades on the night for a total of €1,250. Furthermore we sold the remaining glasses on eBay at auction which resulted in another 50 pairs sold for prices ranging from €7 - €25 (yes someone paid €25 + P&P for something that cost me €1!) bringing in €750 in revenue. Unfortunately (for me) the tax man also got his cut as I got a letter from the revenue Commissioners a few weeks later asking for €90, which we promptly(after much debate!) paid. Profit for the project excluding all expenses was around €1,500.

I will go into some of the more business details of the operation and also what I learned from the experience in future posts.

Finally on the drive to Dublin, we passed through a town neither of us had ever heard of called Moneygall, we took this as a good sign (excuse the pun) and on the way home couldn't resist taking a few snaps to illustrate our success!

Get Rich or Blog Trying...

Making Money from Kanye West in College

This is the penultimate post in my Kanye West story, which was the reason I started this blog. Sorry it's taken so long, all I can say is; never take photos on a camera with a Memory Stick Duo Pro memory card, because it's about as useful as tits on a bull. To read the start of this story check out

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...

Democracy is an awful way to run a country, but it's the best system we have.

I started this blog 18 months ago, at that time I wanted my blog to be an Irish version of www.nevblog.com. A blog discussing my attempts to get rich or die trying...since that time it has evolved, with a greater reliance on business commentary and theory than entrepreneurial actions, and in more recent times, the blog has evolved again into focusing on issues specific to Ireland. This causes a dilemma because the vast majority of my readers are from outside of Ireland and I presume want to hear about business and entrepreneurial topics and not about the economic fog in which Ireland is presently.

Let me just say that events in Ireland in the last 18 months as well as the emergence of Barack Obama as a political leader have inspired me to become engaged in the political process. As Plato said

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors"

So.... in conclusion, in the future this blog will focus solely on business matters, and I hope to begin posting more not just about companies but also their stock market performance. This is something I have been meaning to do but have lost sight of with my new found political views. For those interested in business and entrepreneurship stay tuned, the conclusion to my Kanye West story will be posted tomorrow and for those who may wish to follow my thoughts on Ireland today please check me out on www.politicstudent.com and follow me Ireland related tweets here @politicstudent

thank you