The Comfort4U team, consisting of Gabriela, Susette, Claudia, and myself have decided to stay together and continue progressing our chair cover design. We have added two other groups, a research team with members Deanna and Kaiyla, and a Tech Team with members Gaby, Brianna, and Amanda. The Research team will be working on researching the benefits of improved seating posture and sitting overall, and the Techs will be creating and testing trials with our chair cover with ARS students as their test subjects. My group’s job is to deal with the marketing and business portion of our design. Our overall objective is to promote the health and educational benefits of our chair cover and market towards AISD students and AISD middle/high schools.
For the past few weeks we have been researching effective business plans and marketing ideas to help us create a outline for our proposal. With the help of Ms. Miesner and her book, we were able to find a general outline of a business plan. We discovered that some important aspects of business plans include the executive summary, which is mainly the attention grabber of the entire plan, the Business Description, which is where you describe what exactly your business is and how it’s set apart from other similar businesses, and Marketing Strategy, which is where you describe your market, the pricing of the goods, and how it will be promoted.
While we understood the basics of what our Business Plan should include, the team was getting confused by the overload of business and marketing terms that went through one ear and out the other. Eventually we found ourselves stuck in a rut, we tried creating a mind map to organize our brainstorming and help lay out an idea of what we wanted in our final draft, and while that helped us figure out effective advertisement techniques, we were still confused on how to progress.
We called over Ms. Jo for some guidance and she suggested that instead of being stuck in “left-brained” mode, we should check out Jennifer Lee’s “The Right-Brain Business Plan,” which is a artsy step-by-step approach to creating a business. We liked this idea immediately because it would give us a chance to combine our research-heavy side with a easy-to-understand artsy aesthetic appearance. Plus how could we refuse vision boards and collages?
I have already read a little of Lee’s books and she has some modules that my group could really get into to help our business move further, such as creating customer sketches, creating a business landscape play sheet, or creating a “Moolah” plan.
StarPathDesign 
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