A student-run business is a fairly new endeavor for Southeast of Saline, and this store project is an experiment that will help guide decisions going forward. We greatly appreciate any and all ideas you have about the future of student-run businesses at SES. If you have ideas for other products, business partnerships that we could explore, or simply a general question, send us an email here.
The purpose of a student-run business is to give students the opportunity to see how their efforts and skills can have consequences outside of the classroom. The projects that the Media Technology students have created this semester are no longer limited to teacher assessment, but are now open to a real-world test, a test that only has one question: will their product sell?
When designing their products, students asked themselves these types of questions:
Who is my target audience?
What product(s) would appeal to my target audience?
What is the cost to produce my product (time, effort, materials)?
How much do I charge to make it profitable?
Did they calculate correctly? That's for you to decide!
Although we hope to branch out next year, the majority of our products this year were either 3D printed or posters. The students had access to a handful of 3D printers and one large poster printer! 3D projects were primarily designed on a free website called Tinkercad, and the posters were designed using sites such as Canva. A laser engraver and CNC machine have been added to our tool kit, but we haven't had time to master them... yet.