29A – Venture Concept No. 2 Submit Assignment

I think coming up with a business name would be really difficult.  For now, I decided on Jewelry by LJ, short for Leo James.  Leo is my cat's name and James is my brother's middle name.
Since starting college three years ago, I have lost my apartment key at least five times.  This may not seem like a lot, but when you are a college student paying almost or more than one thousand dollars a month for rent plus over $500 per month to be in a sorority, paying $50 several times to replace a key is not ideal.  I am not alone—this has happened to several of my friends and peers at University of Florida many times.  I asked myself, “Why does this happen?”  I found the answer was because when I would leave my place either to go out with friends or to class, I would have my key either loose in a bag or tied on a ponytail on my risk.  A lot of my friends and peers do this as well to have their key at their convenience—but keys on a flimsy ponytail are not secure.  Not only are they not secure, but when girls dress up to go out to nice events and want to hold minimal things, a key on a ponytail hanging off one’s arm can ruin a good outfit.  

When looking for a solution to this problem, I looked online for a fashionable jewelry piece that could also hold my apartment key and I found that one did not exist.  I created a bracelet that can be personalized to customers’ desires (charms with initials, sorority symbol, school symbol, state symbol, birthstone, etc.) and has a secure clip that can hold any kind of apartment key.  This product solves the problem of losing the key and depending on something like a ponytail to hold it on your wrist.  Our market is not limited to college-aged girls on UF campus, but campus’ nationwide.  We are not just targeting student in Greek Life, but we would expect them to be a large part of our consumer base.  There are over 750,000 students currently enrolled in Greek Life nationwide.  We believe this opportunity will be open until possibly one day we use something other than keys to get into our residences, which could possibly never happen.

Bracelets of our quality are sold on the market for at the minimum of $25. We do not want our product to be perceived as too expensive because our target market is college student who often aim to spend less, but we also want consumers to perceive our product to be high in quality.  We produced our first test-product for under $4.  We estimate that the price to create our product when buying supplies in bulk would be cheaper so the profit margin (currently above 600%) would be even larger. 

Customers will want to buy our product because it could become a trend—but not a fad. It provides convenience and personalization which are two concepts customers often look for to fulfil their wants and needs.  We believe that with our predicted successful use of social media, we think it will not be too hard to get customers to be interested in our product, or at least check the product out.  There are not competitors that make something like this now, but jewelry lines could adapt and make something like our product if it became popular—and there is definitely not a shortage of jewelry businesses.  Our packaging would also play a role in our product.  Not only is the consumer just taking part in a transaction, but an experience that makes them happy and makes them and others want to build a relationship with our brand. N At the beginning stages of our business, I do not see needing more people other than an investor (we have that covered) and someone to help us with our digital/media marketing. 

The “secret sauce” of my venture is the fact that I myself am similar to the representation of our target consumer.  Our target consumers would be college aged girls (~18-24) who have the ability and desire to purchase jewelry that can also be personalized to them.  As similar as I am to the target consumer, I can think like them so I believe that what I would like in jewelry they would also like.  

What is next for our venture is designing more products for our first line and advertising them on social media.  Something a lot of companies do to get started is sharing their product at a discount or for free to social media influencers or people they know to market the brand to get more exposure and then hopefully a customer base.

If I launched my venture, in five years I would hope that it would be a big part of my life, but that I would still be able to either have a career in IT or Health.  I am not sure what would actually happen if I launched this now, but if being a CEO of my own company from my own idea became my career, I would be ecstatic.  As an entrepreneur, in the next decade, I would hope to be selling my product at not only my online shop, but also online with other shops and in person at different stores nationwide.  Later on down the road, we would hope to keep the business within the family and pass it down to my future children.
All of my feedback from my group was positive, and summed up what they included was the price point I described, my communication skills and being a part of my target audience.  I did not receive feedback to change anything, so I went back and specified a few things like the costs that college students have, where the business name came from, and our planned exit strategy at the end.
I included a picture of a bunch of different customizable bracelets that I like the look of and can see us designing ours to look like.