Help w/ school store

[malm42]

My marketing class runs a school store. We're split into two teams (exactly the Donald Trump's 'The Apprentice'). We sell products such as t-shirts, flip-flops, a bunch of snack foods, we once sold USB Flash Drives. Does anybody have any good idea's on what would be a "HOT" item to sell in our school store?

[ChaseManset]

Jägermeister

[nordicnomad]

bump to kill spam

[Franakapan]

Jägermeister = Yum

But seriously, what age range are we talking about here? Socio-economics? Location? More details will enable us to give you a better response.

[zoobie]

What about school basics?

[Franakapan]

Edit: Oops, kinda replying to Tims post as if I was supposed to be suggesting ideas for it - guess I should pay more attention to the OP... But anyway, you should be able to get something out of this both Malm and Tim...

Three suggestions for you the first of which being price cutting. Set up a product or two as a 'loss-leaders' - the low prices attract people to the store and they may be more inclined to by other items as well as the discounted ones (I don't think this would be completely suitable as it depends on the stores 'footfall' and I would probably only use this strategy if you want to get rid of stock that is unpopular and/or going out of stock).

The second idea would be to introduce a new product every so often and advertise the fact that you do have a new product in store. This variation, or the desire customers might have to try new products, might attract more customers to the store.

The last idea I thought of was to get hold of a list of past students at the school for the last, say, 50 years (if possible - be inventive if you can't find a dedicated list), contact as many as possible and try to sell them items of clothing similar to the ones listed on the shop website. This might do well as I imagine people like to be sentimental about the schools they attended.

Be advised that the suggestions above are based upon speculation - I know nothing about the American or your local cultures, your school, the demographics of your area, sales figures, budget, etc... You should take all this, your class' knowledge of the school and the local area, and market research data into consideration when determining the development of the store and its strategies.

Another thing you might want to consider is the viability of a holiday store in, what appears to be, a very unholidayish area (at least thats the impression I get from the Wayne website). The location of the 'remote' store should be taken into consideration; can you leverage the bank's patrons?

However, I hope my ideas get your entrepreneurial juices flowing, and that you and your class get the ideas rolling out and the money rolling in!

[Franakapan]

Why not diversify and organise school events? I am part of my school's student committee and we have been organising parties, music festivals and various other fund raising activities. We are set to be generating approximately £800 profit (200 tickets sold at £5 each = £1000 - venue rental of £200 = £800) from a battle of the bands we are holding this month.

Go even further and sell produce related to events you organise.

[malm42]

Well, are school store is a lot of Tim's. We sell snacks, drinks, appearal, ect. The store is open during study halls and how it works is that our class is split into two teams. I am the General Manager for one team. Each team gets $100 and we can use it on any kind of product/products we want. Each team gets two days of the week say Monday & Tues. for Team 1 and Wed. & Thurs. for Team 2. Whoever has the most gross sales wins. We won the first competition last week by generating $149 in two days.

[Franakapan]

Again, I know nothing about American or your local culture, and know nothing of your target market, but it sounds like you are doing well already. If you want to progress further you need to learn from any mistakes you might have made, expand on the sucesses you have already had. Is there anything you could do better? Where are you losing money unnecessarily? There are far to many questions that you and your team should be asking yoursleves to list.

I suggest that your team and yourself sit down together, mind map a large selection of potential business developments/propositions, research and evaluate each and then proceed with the ones that you deem to be suitable.

Feel free to ask more questions etc.