Five seventeen year olds are gathered round a table — pen and paper in the middle — brainstorming.
A rubbish bin strap was where it started. Laptops opened, phones dialled, conversations had, thorough market research conducted. But it wasn’t to be, two products almost had been created and sold to the councils in Wellington. Back to the drawing board….
We stayed on the environmental thread; merino? Merino what?… Streetwear?… no… clothing?… undies?… socks?.. socks…. socks!! Back to the laptops, the phones, the research. A survey about merino socks and undies was compiled, distributed, and we watched carefully as the responses came in. All 167 of them, in a few days. Maybe we were on to something…Socks? Was there a gap?
We took this half cooked idea to our mentor, and in what turned out to be one of the defining moments of our project, he encouraged us to think bigger. Spurred on by this meeting, we went out to the public again.
“Tell us everything about your socks!”, “Tell us your sock stories!”.
And they did.
In another week we had spoken to 200 more people, and learnt everything we could about their sock experiences.
We sat down as a team and thought…..
“What’s the problem here? What is the common pain point between the hundreds of people that we spoke to?”.
Bingo. Buying their socks. Almost everyone in our survey loathes it!
“Its boring”, “It’s a waste of time!”, “Buying my socks is just something that has to be done, doesn’t mean I like it at all”.
You get the picture — I mean shivers you probably agree with the picture! So we thought, “How can we solve this?”. A myriad of ideas bounced around the room, but a subscription sock service was the one that really stood out to us.
Companies like MyFoodBag and Dollar Shave Club have already paved the way for customers to buy their necessities via subscription, so we knew that customers would be open to the idea.
We worked our backsides off to build our brand, develop our MVP, build our website, organise our production, create and market our social media pages and find a name! (admittedly, the task which seemed to take the longest….)
So here we are… from rubbish bin strap to subscription socks, we give you;
*clapping!…… shouting!…… cheering!….. woop woops!*
Wait! Stop! Wait hang on a minute! That’s just the name, its just the start!!
We haven’t achieved anything yet! Sure we’ve built the platform…. But we need customers! We need orders! We need stylish, unique new socks in peoples letterboxes! Then we need to do it all again — except bigger and better — the next month!
*Oh…….*
But hold your excitement! There’s a lot of work to be done — but man we’re excited!
We want to build a service so amazing that people are queuing up at their own letterbox waiting for the courier, the same way they queue up outside the Apple store for the new iPhone.
“That awesome….?” you say….
THAT AWESOME.
For our team of five; Luke, Conor, Isaac, Ben and myself; Nicholas, this is one super exciting entrepreneurial journey.
We’re super lucky to have an awesome team running Young Enterprise Scheme in Wellington — particularly Gavin Miller and Steph Benseman who’ve been such a huge help already!
We’re also incredibly fortunate to have Nick Churchouse from Creative HQ as our mentor — the awesome one who told us to “think bigger” earlier on in our development.
As well as that our awesome business studies teacher Mr Koshy— who lets us skip class to work on building this business to be as super awesome as possible for our customers!
But at the end of the day this service is for you! We want to deliver you stylish, unique new socks you can wear with pride, whilst simultaneously saving you the boring job of going and buying boring socks from a boring store!
