Importance of e-marketing- Saturday 24 August 2013

One of elective courses offered this semester is e-marketing, which is proving to be extremely beneficial with regards to our business. We were given two websites to compare on various characteristics such as navigation, ease of use, appeal to the target audience and of course discoverability.  The websites compared were www.hertz.co.za and www.lingscars.com, if you are interested in seeing two extremes in the car industry.With...

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Creativity in business- Friday 23 August 2013

As part of the postgraduate diploma in entrepreneurship offered at the University of Cape Town, students are offered the opportunity to do one of three elective creativity courses. Writing, music or bread making. I selected the bread making course, run by a start-up in Cape Town BREADrev. It was hosted at a beautiful tea room Montebello, in the suburb of Newlands. Three "Rocket Ovens" were set up and roaring, with large tables set out in front of...

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Adding value part 2- Thursday 22 August 2013

Creation: The Azura can be worn in over 20 different ways and allows the consumer to be extremely creative in their clothing design and style. This product is up to the imagination as it can be worn as a dress, skirt, tunic, shirt, shawl and more. Freedom: The beauty of it all is that it comes down to freedom, to do with as little or as much with the Azura as works for the individual. After all, it is for Anybody, Anywear! Identity: We...

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Adding value part 1- Wednesday 21 August 2013

Post launch of the business and the sales report being handed in, the team has had to critically reflect on our sales, marketing and product since it has gone to market. It also required us to consider if our product will allow us the ability to build a sustainable business.The important question is: does the business add value? If we consider the fundamental human needs as described by Max-Neef (1989), our product is an economic good that satisfies...

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Valuable insights of a serial entrepreneur- Tuesday 20 August 2013

Each week we attend a workshop hosted for the entrepreneurship students. They have covered everything from innovation techniques, to pitching sessions and awesome guest lecturers. We  recently received a lecture from Tim Shier, a serial entrepreneur based in Cape Town. He covered an extensive amount of content for two hours, however the key take out points were clear, very inspiring and I would like my reflections with you. It takes...

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Reflections of the PDM Entrepreneurship- Monday 19 August 2013

It is a few days after launch, the pinnacle event of the diploma, aside from graduating. I began this diploma after graduating from an undergraduate degree at age 22. I wasn’t interested in studying further in the field of science and was fed up with all the theory! I didn’t feel ready to start working and had no idea what I would do anyway. This course offers a practical component alongside theory and a completely different approach to anything...

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Sunday 18 August 2013 Entrepreneurship

Something I read on the Internet that spoke very loudly to me....A love note to entrepreneurs:Do your best work.Touch one person.Make a difference to a handful.Build a legacy not just an empire.Keep your values front and centre.Launch ideas from the heart.See the world as it isn't.Make passion your master.Allow possibility to feed your so...

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Saturday 17 August 2013 Sales sales sales

Valuable lessons I have learnt about the sales aspect of business this week :Individual With regards to sales on a personal level, I have learnt that I am more confident as salesperson when engaging a potential customer by physically demonstrating the different ways in which the Azura can be worn.GroupBeing part of such a big group seemed to make sales slightly challenging at times.  Not all members of the group are equally as good at selling...

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Friday 16 August 2013 Dreams

Today we had an interesting meeting with an inspiring individual called Dustin. Dustin is from Showcase and showed very keen interest in our product and offered his services as platform to sell our product online. He seemed very passionate about what he does and especially in helping students and other young startup businesses like ours to get off the ground.It was lovely to have someone see so much potential in our product and in our work. When...

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Thursday 15 August 2013 Skills

Last night was an evening filled with preparation for our Professional Communications oral exam rehearsal as well as our written exam. Can you believe that even the rehearsal counts towards our term mark. I guess that this forces students to take it more seriously and actually come properly prepared. We all know the average student will try and get away with doing as little work as possible ;)Many complaints and opinions were voiced regarding the...

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Wednesday 14 August 2013 We are all crazy here ;)

Last night was a looooong night...The team was up till late working on our Sales Report document that was due for hand-in today. It was quite a challenge documenting all the intricacies and lessons learnt from our big launch day. All the trials and tribulations that accompanied launch made this quite an important document for all of us as it was a big learning curve for the team and a starting point for necessary changes that are yet to come.We are...

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Tuesday 13 August 2013 Darn cord!

Only the best is good enough!!!With the challenges that product launch/exhibition brought valuable lessons were learnt. Quality control and not rushing production became two of our most valuable lessons from this experience...The cord used in our garments was a big let down as it caused so many errors in production that most of our garments had to be returned to our CMT to be repaired. Using cord that was not spun tight enough for the intricacy of...

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Monday 12 August 2013 Ri's reflections

Launch has come and gone...  What and exciting and overwhelming day for all of us. This day came with many trials and tribulations but we conquered it all! It was amazing to see so many excited faces light up as we told them about our product and what it can do... Many weren't as enthusiastic, but that was to be expected as one product cannot be everyone's cup of tea. The weather unfortunately did not play in our favour and the rainy...

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Sunday 11/08/2013

Sunday 11/08/2013   To close of my blog session for the week, id like to leave you guys with 18 inspirational quotes for entrepreneurs written by various entrepreneurs over the years. Hope you will find these as inspiring as I have and may you all try to apply these to your everyday life.   1. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Peter Drucker   2. “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” - Vince Lombardi   3. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life....

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Friday 09/08/2013

Friday 09/08/2013   This morning proved to be a very difficult one as most of us were tired from the  events of the whole week. However many things still needed to be completed thus it is true when they say an entrepreneur’s work day is undefined. Returning all items that we had borrowed proved to be a difficult task considering that we were still expected to attend class the following day. This day proved to give us a fresh perspective of how we performed on the day. As much as we were despondent on the day of exhibition due...

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Thursday 08/08/2013

Thursday 08/08/2013   As an entrepreneur you are faced with many different situations, and having been exposed to an exhibition environment you tend to learn that people may have different opinions regarding your product. In such cases you need to open for some criticism. That’s the only way you learn to refine your product to suit customer needs.   In terms of preparation you need to realize that no matter how much one prepares one can never be fully aware of what the outcome will be on the day. In such cases one has to learn...

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Wednesday 07/08/2013

Wednesday 07/08/2013   Exhibition day, this day was more daunting then we had imagined, the rain gods proved to not be on our side as the heavens continued to pour down for most of the day, this made it difficult for people to appreciate our product offering. This was due to the fact that any customer who has been walking in the rain and is soaking wet as a result, would unlikely choose to buy a summer dress when the is a rain coat being sold right next door.   However as much as the day didn’t work out to be a resounding...

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Tuesday 06/08/2013

Tuesday 6/08/2013   For some reason today I woke up with a lot of nerves and seriously worried as some things weren’t not able to be completed yesterday, the banner needs to be picked up today, the mannequins as need to be picked and lastly the frames from Earthchild project that we will be using to decorate our store.   As it can be imagined this day will be full of running around and stressing, however I’m glad to say that all our arrangements went according to plan, even though we experienced some hairy moments during the...

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Monday 05/08/2013

Monday 5/08/2013   Mondays has become a very lazy day for me lately, Not having classes to attend give me a chance to catch up past readings that I haven’t completed as yet and a chance to complete reading for the week ahead.   However before I elaborate too much on the week ahead, I would first like to talk about the past weekend events which ended up with me attending the Earthchild Project movie screening which was held at the SHALA in Gardens.   This proved to be a very worthwhile event to attend as it further...

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2nd August Today we had ourboard meeting with our directors. I was great to meet with them and get advice and feeddback as to where we are headed in terms of our launch. The response we got from them was positive and it was nice to know that we had made progress despite the hickups we had along the way. The directors were impressed with our promotional strategy, and how we were promoting our product online, as well as how we would promote it on campus. The directors howver were concerned about the pricing of our product, stating that pricing...

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Exhibition nightmare

August 1st today wasnt such a great day for Azura. We learnt that our cutter who was meant to cut our fabric for lauch had not yet started cutting and only left the material to rest on Tuesday, when he was meant to have done it over the weekend. Our material takes two days to rest so we were only able to pick up the material from him today, after having to go there and beg him to cut our material, as we were now very behind in our production line process. We managed to get the material to the CMT this afternoon, however with the delay from the...

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Communication is key

31st July It is now officially one week to go till our product launch. emotions are high, filled with excitement as well as anxiety. At this stage communication as a group is very important, however as a group our communication levels are declining. It seems in our business, communication seems to be getting lost along the way, and certain deadlines are failing to be met because of this. Our business has failed to reach two deadlines due to poor communication and as a result members are not happy with some members lack of communication. Communication...

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Police horror

30 July 2013 Today was a different day in our group. One of our group members had gone "missing" from the time we wrote exams last semester. We as a group had thought she had just left the course and nolonger wanted to continue. However when we recieved an alarming message from a family member of hers saying she had not contacted them in over a month and were wondering if we had heard from her. As a group we found this very alarming and took it upon ourselves to go straight to the police station and report a missing person, after having called...

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welcome back to school

Monday 29th July Hi, its me again.. So its back to school after the long long holiday. Its the start of the third week back at school so setteling down is becoming easier. This semester has started off on a fast pace. It feels like there wasn't really a holiday and we've been literrally thrown into the deepend with production, due to the  launch of our new product being just days away. Being in the marketing department of our business has lead me to have a new appreciation for how important the marketing of a product at the market...

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