Gobble Gobble Eat Me!
Cake Candi Creations[]
“You've Never Eatin'Cake Like This Before!”
We are a team of James Madison University entrepreneurs and our business venture is based on the wonderful discovery of cake pops. Our team is made up of Hayden Baronian, Lauren Trentham, and Meagan Whitfield. We plan to produce unique flavors, shapes, and themes of cake pop arrangements to innovate the cake pop industry.
Inovative Insight[]
Business Model
Some of our innovative insight that we gathered from our business model are having a mass market with multiple segments and then creating new shapes and themes for cake arrangements that are co-created with our customer. Our value-proposition of co-creation, customization, and design aesthetics is the most innovative aspect of our business model. This is an improvement over competitors because the idea is so new and there are not any competitors that match what we are doing. Also, the few that do offer cake-pops have a set menu and do not specialize in making the pops. They don’t offer the vast possibilities of customizable arrangements that we can offer.
Early Adopters []
We discovered that we do not have any specific type of profile for a person who would buy cake pops. We have sold to a wide variety of people and market segments. Surprisingly males are the early adopters of our product. The arrangement we sold most of were to young men at JMU who found our rose bouquet arr
Lets see what other profile of people will adopt
angement a perfect gift for birthdays, anniversaries, and etc. Other early adopters include young females seeking birthday gifts, apartment complexes that provide resident parties, holiday gifts, JMU organizations seeking professional speaker gifts, professors. The list could go on. Our customers are usually seeking gifts, JMU affiliated/want to support JMU students, want to support small business, looking for a unique gift, and have tried cake pops.
Achieving Success[]
Critical to the success of Cake Candi Creations is our value proposition. We had to determine if people would pay for design and customization. Our efforts to achieve this was through first selling samples that people enjoyed and next explaining through pictures, a menu, and verbal selling and tailoring the arrangements to appeal to different people through co-creation.
MVP Evolution[]
We began selling cake pops singularly and discovered that selling them one at a time was not sustainable, however we learned that people will pay for cake pops. Next, we focused on selling them in arrangements charging extra for toppings, fillings, customization, and containers.
Failures We Experienced []
- We began selling cake pops singularly and discovered that selling them one at a time was not sustainable, however we learned that people will pay for cake pops. Next, we focused on selling them in arrangements charging extra for toppings, fillings, customization, and containers.
- We had a hard time in the beginning deciding what to charge for the individual cake pops. In the end, we should have quickly picked a price and tested it instead of arguing about it for an hour.
- Having to go buy the materials for each arrangement. This took up a lot of time. It’s hard to buy mass supply because so many different types of cake pop arrangements.
-
Scheduling times to meet up and make the cake pops. With school, work, and other activities going on, it was hard to schedule times for all 3 of us to get together and make the cake pops.
Our first production day was long; eight hours of cake pops. Hayden managed to blow the engine on our only electric mixer. :(
Some Things We Learned During MVP Evolution[]
1. We have learned that there are many customer segments we can sell to. We need to do more research to figure out which segments are the best segments to market/sell too. We could base this off of which segments are most profitable.
2. We also have learned more time efficient way to produce the cake candi. We buying materials for all arrangements for a week and make them all in one day.
3. We started to delegate specific tasks for each member to do, so we don't have anyone spending unnecessary time doing a task that can be done by one or two members of the team.
4. We have found simpler and easier ways to make the cake pops that cuts down on time and effort.
5. We used our creative minds to think of different flavors, shapes, and themes to make a larger variety of cake pop arrangements. We also have thought of very creative and aesthetically pleasing containers for our arrangements to look more professional to our customers.
Resources[]
- Our resources we got materials and information from are:
- Walmart
- Micheals
- Dollar Store
- Cake Pops Tips, Tricks, and Recipes for More than 40 Irresistible Mini Treats by Bakerella
- We used How to make Cake Pops to show us how to create these cake candi.
- Our materials are: Cake mix, frosting, Chocolate coating, sticks, bags, ribbon and containers.
- One of our team members, Meagan Whitfield, has her culinary degree and already had most to all of baking tools and clean kitchen facility that we would need to create these amazing cake pops. So this saved us a lot of time and money from having to go buy all of these tools.
-With these resources, creative mindset, and baking skills of our team members, we have been able to make wonderful cake candi arrangements to sell to many of customer market segments.
Menu: Some Ideas and prices of arrangements
Advice For Future Students[]
Words of Wisdom:
Advice for future entrepreneur students is to remember skills learned from COB 300 which gave you experience in multiple areas of business working with the same team all semester. Also, you’ll be taking the thirty page business plan essentially throwing it out of the window, and using a one page business model; be ready to hit the ground running, it’s a very dynamic fast-paced course.
The team has to have a leader. I saw a couple of teams that really didn’t have at least one person guiding the efforts of the group. That turned into not much getting done initially. The course is very self-managed so you have to have good time management and discipline. Ultimately, how well you keep up with assignments and put effort into your business will reveal itself in your grade but also your profit.
You will have to do customer discovery and during these ask as many questions as you can. The more information you get from these, the more you can adapt to customers wants and needs. Also, might learn some things you haven't thought about.
A certain amount of conflict is good within the group, think “group think.” Not everyone will be thinking the same way so don’t be afraid to assert what you think is right and argue it out. However, remember you interpersonal skills. Most important: have fun, takes lots of pictures, videos and blog entries so you can incorporate the entire semester into a cool final video project.
More Information about Cake Candi Creations[]
http://cakecandicreations.weebly.com
http://www.facebook.com/CakeCandiCreations
Customer Discovery[]
Through numerous interviews and surveys filled out by random students accross campus, we gathered information to help sustain our business and move the cake pop business forward. We gathered information on the following subjects:
- Any interesting flavor ideas.
- How much people would pay for cake pops
- Where they would buy them.
- How likely they are to buy cake pops - What type of groups would be more likely to buy a cake pop arrangementWe received information on these subjects through 10 video interviews and 20 paper surveys. We also learned a ton from casual conversations with friends and family.
Some of our most important Interviews:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UBbRxz_wfYE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SH8QB2tjq6Y