Business Showcase + Reflection

A glimpse behind the scenes (reflection)

ET9135 has been an amazing journey, with plenty of experiences and friendships forged. I'm thankful to have such an encouraging team. Running a business can be tough, and especially one with 7 people might mean that it could have been hard to come into consensus with everyone on ideas/issues. However, my team has been really understanding towards one another and that meant that there were plenty of room for open discussions and communication despite the number of people in our team.

I thought I'd share some of my learning points here (some not in the report) so that I can look back at what I've learnt when I reread this in the future. Here are my takeaways from this venture:

• Be open to new opportunities: I started out with no prior experience to marketing, and decided to challenge myself with this role. From reading books and articles to learn more about marketing, to implementing them to Felix Natura, I've successfully learned and understand now even more so, about marketing. There are definitely many avenues for us to look into and improve on, and I'll do my best to refine our strategy accordingly to attract our target audience.

• Take creative risks (and don't be afraid to fail): Part of being in a venture is the various risks that you'll be exposed to, from financial, competitive, reputation as well as environmental. It is normal to have risks, take risks, and make mistakes, some of which will be costly. However, with the right planning, funding and flexibility, businesses have a better chance of succeeding. Our team believes a lot in innovation and are always looking for new ways and ideas to improve this venture. Although some of them have failed, we believe it is necessary and a step away to achieving something right.

• Always adapt: We've encountered issues after issues, and that is part of being in a business. Make sure to always anticipate problems, but in the event if that does not happen, don't worry! Just make sure to take action towards the problems that matter. For our team, an instance would be when I was doing a TikTok video with my friend, I received feedback that the boxes we provided were too big, and that the packaging could be better. With that, I proposed for us several solutions to help with those issues faced such as the addition of fillers, which up till this day we've been using as a form of user experience for the user. We also now provide several sizes for our box depending on the casing ordered.

• Engagement and branding: Branding is especially important, as well as having your own USP. Without a strong brand, it'll be hard for customers to identify you and in the business's point of view, it's hard to get an accurate picture or think about where this business is heading and what kind of strategies to formulate. For us, upon consultation, we tried having various posts as recommended such as funny/emotional etc, and focus on engagement of our posts to see how far we are from expectations. Also, ensuring that all of us have hit a certain kpi (in our case, 3 creative and 3 non-creative terrariums per person) within the next 6 weeks. Hopefully, this will help with our sales too.

To future batches: I hope this will be helpful for you to do better. All the best! :-)