Our Experience of Taking Part in The Student Enterprise Programme
– by 2 Peas In A Pod
2020 is a year that many want to forget!!!
For some, it brought lonliness and boredom, but for us, thanks to taking part in the Student Enterprise Programme, it brought to life our business 2 Peas in a Pod.
Where our business idea came from?
We became inspired with our business idea just a few weeks into lock down. We were playing a game with our family, sent to us from German friends, where we had to match images from Cologne. It was then that the idea came to us to create our own fun-filled family memory game based on Wexford images. We did some research online and we didn’t see any similar games.
In September, as 1st year students in St Mary’s, New Ross, we learned about the Student Enterprise Programme (SEP). So we decided to turn our idea from lockdown into a product.
Our business teacher and lots of our friends and family thought it would be a great idea. So we decided to go for it. We set up the business and named it 2 Peas in a Pod because we are twins and because the aim of our game is to match 2 identical images of Wexford and get 2 Peas in a Pod. We decided to add a quiz to to our product, for a bit of extra excitement.
So many lessons learned along the way!
Overall, we are thrilled we took a risk and set up our student enterprise as we got the chance to make a fantastic product. We developed loads of skills throughout the journey. We have learned so many lessons and skills in entrepreneurship since last September. Here’s some of the most important ones that we’ve learned:
Intellectual Property (IP):
- While on our entrepreneurial journey, we learned many great lessons and skills. Our first task was to contact photographers from Wexford to ask them to donate pictures. This was our first challenge as we did not know the photographers and they did not know us and so they really had to trust we were putting their images to good use.
- This was when we learned about Intellectual Property as we had to name each photographer on their image as it was their work. We loved picking out the pictures as they were really good quality and showed our county in a beautiful way.
Dealing with suppliers:
- Another challenge was getting the product printed. We researched printing prices and visited some printers but this was more difficult due to Covid. We decided to go with local printer Emco as we could walk to them after school and John was really great to give us advice.
Learning about using different forms of media:
- We made a promotional video using iMovie which we had never used before and we did an interview with the New Ross Standard.
- We also set up Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram accounts for our business with our parents’ permission.
- We learned about using Pay Pal for making payments also.
Learning how to sell & promote:
- Some of our sales were made in school to our friends and teachers and in our primary school too.
- It was harder to sell our game in person due to Covid and lack of Christmas markets but with more people at home, online sales were easier, we think.
- We got great selling tips on the SEP webinars every Monday such as the importance of “being passionate” when making sales and also to “listen to the customer” so we really tried that.
- We’ve now sold about 150 products by keeping it promoted. We have gotten some lovely comments from our followers and customers. We tagged well known people like Kevin Dundon, Tadgh Furlong, Eoin Murchan and Walter Walsh to endorse or ‘like’ our product too which gave us some great publicity. RTE Nationwide follows us too.
- We have also asked some businesses to sell our product for us like Kevin Dundon’s Dunbrody House Hotel.
Finding Inspiration:
- We find Derval O’Rourke, the new Female Ambassador for the SEP very inspiring. She is an outstanding athlete and she’s our favourite coach on Ireland’s Fittest Family!!! We didn’t know that she is also a super entrepreneur in the area of health and fitness so she really has lots of good advice to give.
Managing Our Time & Money:
- Keeping track of our costs and finances was important too so we really had to shop around for the best value packaging options.
- We also had to manage our time well especially during November and early December when we had to meet all our orders, get them posted in time for Christmas and prepare for our school exams in first year too.
- We are lucky that we worked well as a team that we could share our work load. We would advise others to make a list of tasks to do and divide them up between them and to have fun during the experience.
Keeping Motivated:
- To keep motivated, we try to promote our product every few days on social media, so that people get to know about it and hopefully buy it.
- We tell our followers about the benefits of our product, like it is fun, it is educational, it helps improve memory and it makes a great gift especially for people missing Wexford. Believing in ourselves and our product works to motivate us.
Although we are only 13, we’re getting to see what it is like to run a real life business for ourselves. We are really enjoying the experience …. and we love making money too!!!
