Kelvin Chua

How the terrarium idea came about

Chief Technical Officer

Computer Science School of Computer Science and Engineering

About Myself

Ever since young I always been fascinated with technology. I was in robotics for 6 years from secondary school to Junior College and this have in some ways mold my engineering thinking and problem solving skills.

I am blessed in meeting many significant people in my life which would ultimately made me sign up for this minor to learn more about business and honing my business acumen. Currently in my penultimate year in Computer Science, I want to use my skills in coding to start a business from scratch and hopefully make a significant impact to people's lives.

10 October 2021

We just had a consultation with Mr Rodrick about the 2 ideas - social Media Marketing and DIY terrarium Kits. We were initially very hopeful for the first idea and hoping that Mr Rodrick would be satisfied with it and would gain his approval. Though after much discussion, he pointed out many flaws in the former idea and were not very impressed with the idea. Then, we decided to share our second idea, to our surprise, he was more open to this idea and was quite receptive to it. This could be partly because there was past group whom have done this idea before and he himself is sort of a plant lover as well (he showed us a view of his balcony and it was practically a forest haha). He also mention that he have alumnis event which which he can connect together with for marketing.

After a long discussion, we decided to move on with DIY terrarium kit to promote mental wellness idea as it was a simpler idea in terms of execution and planning. Even though it wasn't part of our initial plan, I was low key grateful for this idea as it was easier and thought it was a better choice as compared to the other one.

I was assigned the role of Chief technical officer and have been given task of taking charge of the technical side of the business.

16 October 2021- Presentation

During the days leading up to the presentation, I was teamed up with Nigel to do up the introduction, PESTEL, Porter's five forces and SWOT analysis. We stayed up pretty late to do finish the report, though I didn't stayed as late as them because I have morning lessons the next day. We also came up with our name which is quite cool - Felix Natura (credits to Nigel).

On the day of the presentation, I was in charge of the introduction and potential challenges. I felt I could have done better, having more confidence in the hook, telling an interesting hook is really important in capturing the audience's attention. Nevertheless, the presentation overall was great and we received great feedback and questions.

After the presentation, we had a meeting to allocate the task and some admin matter relating to incorporating our company.

24 October 2021 - First Weekly Meeting

I was tasked with coming up with the timeline regarding the technology - Shopify. I suggested using a third party e-commerce website compared to doing one up from scratch as firstly, dealing with payment services will be very tough as the security aspect have to be very secured when dealing with sensitive information such as credit cards. Furthermore, coming up with our own website would require a long time as we would have to design a professional looking website and there is back end which we have to build. Though having our own website would allow us to build an interactive user interface for customization of our terrariums, the cost of building one far outweighs that benefit. Shopify allow us to also customize our product to a certain extent but it would not have the same user interface as we would have to use Shopify's website building system just like this which does not allow for complex UI interactions.

I came up with the timeline and taking into account of our examinations, we would have sufficient time to deploy our website by end of this month.

During this week, I tried to familiarize my self with Shopify system which is similar to Google Sites. I found that Shopify is really easy to use and can have additional capabilities such as social media marketing and order fulfillment. Fortunately, we have Richman as well as Nigel and Gabriel who have experience using Shopify and I can just easily ask them for help if I need to.

31 October - Weekly Meeting

During this week, Richmond and I met up to discuss for the design of our website and allocate different pages for both of us. One insight which I learnt which Richmond suggested is having a blog page where we would post blogs/posts regarding terrariums or on mental health. This blog post would help in the google search engine and would help to increase traffic into our page.

During the meeting we also discussed on his suggestion for Christmas event. He also suggested using of doing a Pokémon ball which uses a spherical acrylic ball just like our terrarium with a Pokémon figurine inside it. I thought it was an interesting marketing approach as I believe Singapore have a huge Pokémon fanbase and we could leverage on that to increase our traffic in our early days of our business. Richmond also have a friend which he could outsource this to for this Pokémon project.

During the meeting, we further discussed this idea and decided that we could start preparing for Christmas sale and both me and Richmond would be tasked with the Pokémon project. The entire group also thought that it was better for all of us to order a terrarium or get one ourselves to experience building a terrarium.

7 November - weekly meeting

We set up our Shopify account and we started to explore capabilities offered by Shopify.

Not much progress this week as work and projects begin to pile up.

14 November - Weekly meeting

During this week, I started doing some designs of the website. I researched by looking at other terrarium websites to gain inspiration and design themes.

Not much progress this week as I am busy with tests and projects.

21 November - Weekly meeting

Been really busy with exams and projects so didn't really have much progress for this week.

28 November - Weekly meeting

During this week, we research more on the Shopify system on how to design the website. We explored various themes to see which theme suits "therapeutic" and "nature" the best. as a group we also decided to make the customisation of the terrarium as seamless and fluid as possible - just like ordering a meal, the buyers would be able to customize their housing, plants and the 4 sand colors.

We research more on the Shopify system, we went to watch youtube tutorials on "one product websites"

5 December - Weekly meeting

For this week, there were a few challenges that I had to face. so first off after trying out the Shopify system, I realised that their customization in terms of design aspect of the website is quite limited, like for example, we are only given options of the design to choose from and there are not alot of options to begin with, this really frustrates me as many times when we want to implement a design element in the website, we would realise that theme is unable to do so and we had to find alternative solutions to go around the problem.

Another problem that i find annoying is how Shopify suck our money by forcing us to buy apps for extra functions.But oh wells, we commit to this and just have to go with it.

For progress wise, we completed the section on the colour of the sands. I photoshopped the colour of the sand to fit the different colours we have.

12 December - Weekly meeting

For this week, aim to deploy our website by end of this week. We focus mainly on the main page as we intend to first start off by selling our main product first which is DIY Terrarium kits. Thus, we only of have one product and therefore we try to minimise the number of clicks the users need to checkout their cart.

We faced our first challenge when we first set up the product. This is because Shopify have maximum limit on the number of variants allowed, this goes against our idea of customisability as we are restricted on the number of options for each customisation. After much research and trying to edit the source code, we decided to add an app "Infinite Options" which is our last resort as this would incur more cost though it would save us alot of time and effort. This app provides drop down menus for selection. However, even after having that app, there were still problems such as the theme of the drop down menu doesn't match the theme of the website. This is where i had to bring back my HTML and CSS skills and tried to match the design of the drop down menu to the website theme as close as possible.

Another problem we faced was we couldn't find any suitable images to use for both our products and banners on our website. Since our casing have not arrived yet, we do not have a representative image of our product and had to source the images from other stock photos as a temporary solution. As for our banners, we decided to get our images from Adobe Stock for professional looking images for our website.

After going through all this, I sometimes wonder whether building our own website would be better than going through all this hassle and extra cost. Not only that, Shopify have many limitations and its basically sucking our money though subscriptions of apps. But thinking more about it, it allowed us to design our website faster and would hopefully be deployed soon.

19 December - Weekly meeting

So for this week, WE JUST DEPLOYED OUR WEBSITE ON felixnatura.com please visit and buy some terrariums :) HAHA

I was really quite nervous for the first few days after deployment as i am afraid of any problems which might come up. And we had our first order on 20 DEC WOOTS.

But sadly our glass housing have been further delayed and i had to change some of our items to "out of stock". Hopefully, our glass housing comes soon. This goes to show we have to expect the unexpected such as deliveries of stock might not come on time as we planned. This is because the delivery of the glass housing have been delayed once before to 20th Dec. We decided to push out our website to thinking that we would still be able pack the orders if our stocks arrive on time as we are doing a weekly delivery.

26 December - Cohesion/ Weekly Meeting

We decided to have a Christmas party at Jyn's house today to hang out as well as to have our weekly meeting. We discussed on some issues on with the website and had some discussion relating to rolling out our new product- "Classic Terrarium" and made some changes to "Enclosed Terrarium". Jyn thought of this classic terrarium to provide a cheaper alternative as well as a smaller version of our Creative Terrarium.

I listed the products a few days later with the photos of the terrarium and figurines.

2 January 2022 - Weekly Meeting

For the past week, I made some adjustments to some of the products in our product listing. I listed "Terrarium Accessories" category for terrarium assertories such as figurines. We also are coming up with our CNY themed terrarium. We also discussed marketing strategies for CNY terrarium.

9/10 January - First Consultation and Meeting

For the past week, we created a contact us page.

We had consultation on 9 January with Roderick and we showed him our video for our Terrarium Workshop. We received his feedback and made improvements to our video. For this week, we discussed on CNY marketing strategy and discuss on how to make customer service better.

16 January - Weekly Meeting

this week, me and Nigel work together to come up with the graphic designs for terrarium instructions and maintenance. Under the guidance form Nigel, I learnt on how to design beautifully and using cartoon Icons to have more artsy look. This poster will be on one of our page on our website which will educate our customers how to take care of their plants such as environment conditions. It will also have instructions for our customers to follow regarding on how to make a Terrarium. This page will be access by the customers through the QR code in the boxes. The QR code will bring them to a link tree website which will contain useful links and instruction videos.

24 January -Weekly Meeting

For this week, I uploaded CNY terrarium classic listing on our website with cover photos and figurines. We also finished up the workshop page link where users can choose to join our workshop when they have purchased our terrariums. We also done up the customer service page and the terrarium care link.

27 January

Yay so for today, we went to swiss d floral to attend a terrarium building workshop. overall, the workshop was fun and we learnt many nuances such as placing the colored sand on the edges of the terrarium instead of placing one layer. Hence this would form a bed soil in the center for the plant to grow in. We attended this workshop to learn more about terrarium practically as we would be organizing terrarium building workshops in the future.

It was fun and I managed to create a Chinese New Year Theme terrarium for myself.

30 January - Weekly Meeting

For this week, we had a cohesion at Jyn's House and we ate some pizzas. At the same time, for we discussed on how to refine the Customer enquiries for customer enquiries and purchase. We also discussed our pricing strategy for our terrariums and discussed on the flow and logistics for our upcoming workshop.

7 February- Weekly Meeting

For this week, we discuss discussed on the valentine day listing and added Terrarium kit accessories. we are preparing for the upcoming event -Valentines Day. we discussed mostly on the product design and marketing strategy for this event as well.

13 February - Weekly Meeting

For this week, we discussed on the website design for our workshop page, we also had an AAR on our marketing strategy for our valentines day event. We also discussed on the pricing strategy for our workshop and some of our product lines. And we are starting our B2B marketing for terrarium workshops.

We also made some sales from the valentine day event! which is great as we are getting traction for our business.

20 February - Weekly Meeting

For this week, we discussed on Felix Natura's future after MIE. With Qi Qi and Jyn graduating soon, we have to discuss whether everybody wants to continue with Felix Natura. Everybody decided to continue with the business with some of us taking up new roles. The main direction of the business also pivoted towards building our brand in B2B workshop.

27 February - Weekly Meeting

For this week, we mainly worked on refining our business showcase slides and also ensuring that everything is in place for our upcoming workshop. Unfortunately, I was covid positive and was unable to attend the workshop.

9 March- Weekly Meeting

Joining MIE was definitely one of the best choices I have made.

WOOTS WE HAVE FINALLY COMPLETED OUR MIE 9135!! I wanna thank all the instructors that have taught us and guide us throughout our entire entrepreneurship journey. This 6 months was a tiring one where , we have to juggle this business commitment with our other commitments such as our schoolwork and internships. We had our ups and downs but we all still made it in the end. I am grateful and blessed to have met great friends in my group. Through this journey, I have learnt more about myself and pushed myself out of my comfort zone, exposed to new things and learnt so many things.

To my future MIE mates, I think my biggest reward after this MIE is the friends I have gained. Do this with friends that you can rely on and enjoy the journey.

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