6A – Identifying Opportunities in Economic & Regulatory Trends

1. Plastic Bags- (regulatory)
1. I have found out about this regulatory trend in multiple places. I have read about its dangers to humanity and animals in the news along with changes in policy. Also, I have done a project on this issue in ENC1101 in regards to the endangerment of whales and how it affects human beings in return.
2. It has been banned in certain states including Washington state and other states have added fees as opposed to banning it. Boston is about to ban plastic bags as well. This creates an existing opportunity because now there are a lot of people that need a substitute for plastic bags. For example, this could be cute reusable foldable bags.
3. I think the prototypical customer for this opportunity is a mother who does a lot of grocery shopping and is going to be affected by the ban even though she should already be on the reusable bag trend (lol).
4. Although many businesses will jump on this opportunity making it a little difficult to successfully exploit, reusable bags is not the only substitution for plastic bags and there could be a lot of variations of reusable plastic bags such as different materials and sizes, etc.
5. I saw this opportunity because I did a big project on this topic last year so I know about the increasing number of regulatory changes being made due to the spreading knowledge of damage caused by plastic bags.
2. Funding to arts- (economic)
1. This was inspired by a local opportunity that I noticed due to the decreasing funds to the Hippodrome which really upsets me personally.
2. This suggests that an opportunity might exist because less people right now are being given the opportunity for creative outlets and places to see art-related shows and exhibitions.
3. The prototypical customer to this opportunity is an a part-time actor or dancer or artist of some sort that are looking for jobs and cannot find many opportunities.
4. This opportunity could be relatively easy to exploit because more theatres, art galleries, and dance studios are needed but the difficult part would be attracting customers to a live art business venture. This can be very difficult to find a market for this but I believe in the Gainesville community, there are many students along with locals that appreciate performance art and visual art so much that that they would spend their money on a venture like this.
5. I saw this opportunity because as an actress and arts-lover, I’ve noticed the lack of culture here and creative outlets. On top of that, I have heard from friends about the unfortunate news in regards to the decrease of funds to the Hippodrome.

3. Plastic lids- (regulatory)

1. I found this opportunity online on a news website.
2. This article discusses how many major businesses in the United States are choosing to ban plastic in order to lessen our impact on the environment. This includes places like Starbucks, Au Bon Pain, etc. This can serve as an opportunity for people to increase their usage of reusable mugs, portable cups, and so on.
3. People enjoy being comfortable and having convenient accsess to their drinks. This ban would pose a lot of problems for companies whose premise of profit comes from serving drinks. There will be a need in the market for a cheap eco friendly alternative.
4. This opportunity will be easy to exploit because more people have become proponents of protecting the environment and people love to support environmentally friendly organizations and companies.
5. The ban of plastic lids would cause a ruckus at first but overall become a brilliant business venture. Creating an eco friendly, reusable lid would promote the well being and well meaning nature of big companies. Finding an alternative to plastic lids would be easy since the market can be easily distinguished and targeted.

4. Homeless shelters- (economic)

1. I found this opportunity online on a news website.
2. This article talks about how homeless people in the Gainesville area have increased. They have become increasingly dispersed throughout the city. Creating a home for them is a good business venture because reforming the lives of homeless and reintroducing them into society will help propel the economy forward.
3. The prototypical consumer would be willing homeless people who have been known to plague the Gainesville area.
4. I think that this opportunity is easy to exploit. Many need a shelter to restart their lives and reform them into productive members of society.
5. I think that this would be an opportunity that benefits not just those directly in the shelter, but also all of society. Reforming the lives of the homeless and giving them tools to be productive members of society (such as hygiene products, business clothes, simple life courses) will be beneficial to all.

29A – Venture Concept No. 2

29A – Venture Concept No. 2

Butterfly Pea flower. Have you ever heard of a more beautiful name? This Southeast Asian wonder is a  plant high in antioxidant and anti-cancerous healing properties. It was given to me as a gift to use in teas and flavored water. I not only fell in love with its beautiful cerulean color but upon further research and a small science experiment with this flower, I realized its potential as an enticing food product. It changes color in altering acidic environments, which truly blows me away. I also realized the intensity of this flower’s novelty since no one other than me was familiar with the plant and I was constantly inquired about it.

Realization soon washed over me…With the works and wonders of this amazing plant, I can open up a small café equipped with a complete line of healthy blue products such as almond milkshakes, vegan ice-creams, pastries, coffee beverages and teas. I would be satisfying the unmet need for tasty, sweet, and relatively quick options for people that deal with allergies or dietary preferences. I have noticed an overwhelming amount of healthy, vegan, active, and fit students on and around campus that are interested in continuing their vigorous lifestyles without having to sacrifice their fit diets. My opportunity to exploit a natural food due to commence and enhance a new food trend in favor of dietary aware or restricted people. Using natural and healthy products will be what allures the market. I plan to place my café near school to target the increasing number of young students that care about their health but don’t need to compromise their wallets, time, or their taste buds.

This business idea is innovative because The Butterfly Pea Flower isn't a new flower at all. This flower has been present in history for millenia—used around the world for cosmetic, dietary, and healing purposes. The flower has made a large return as natural dye and is taking over the food industry over artificial coloring. This flower contains anthocyanin which is the flavanoid that causes this array of pigments that range from yellow, red, teal, blue, purple, violet, and pink. Affecting the pH of a solution causes color changes in the flower. Due to the internet people have been spreading word of this flower’s beautiful power and aesthetic. Many people also post about it on Pinterest due to its alluring appeal and plethora of benefits. Finally, many businesses and people have discovered this flower recently and have used it in “mocktails”, blue lemonade and other yummy drinks.

My venture concept is to target and push young and excited people to care (or continue caring) about their health while also indulging in delicious treats that make you feel good inside. I am using Butterfly Pea flower, a very feminine and sensitive flower, as my main resource to do this. The flower establishes  unison and binds my concept throughout. I am using this opportunity to develop a community of people that want to share health consciousness, local talent, and aesthetic appreciation together. I will use my store as a venue and opportunity for hip events as well as provide a space for people to meet others, study, spread art, and enjoy leading a healthy lifestyle. People will care because it will be one of the few places to indulge in sweets, promote the surrounding community, and grab a blue coffee+treat while remaining healthy. People will pay money for my products because they will be irresistibly enticing. The blue and purple hues along with the fact that there aren't that many places around here to get yummy and guilt-free items will have customers crawling back. Many people (especially students) have dietary restrictions now and there is an increasing number of students that care about fitness and wellness. People that recognize a gluten-free, soy-free, and vegan kitchen and its rarity will spend their money at Got the Blues…but after trying out my café they will definitely not have the blues.

I believe my most important resource would be my healthy supplies and ingredients that I get from local suppliers because this was my point with coming up with this venture. Healthy options need to be more accessible and the cute store is the vessel/tool in which I will use to supply the products to people. The fact that all my ingredients will be healthy, energizing, vegan, gluten-free, egg-free, and soy-free is what makes this concept so valuable. This will all be possible with my local suppliers whom I will trust and others can too. This is very valuable to this specific venture because we will brag about this characteristic of our business a lot. The main need we are supplying is healthy options for people and a menu that is clear and clean. Most food & beverage items that are available have many unclear and unhealthy ingredients. They contain high fructose corn syrup and toxic colorants. The whole reason why I chose this venture is because it is too rare and difficult for people to find healthy treats easily with vegan ingredients, or at the very least, ingredients that are not toxic to our bodies. This is possible but requires a lot of extra work. Most eateries use soy, gluten or eggs in the majority of their product. It is difficult to get your kitchen certified organic or gluten-free and not many people would deal with that work…but I definitely will. This is what will separate me from the rest.

Got the Blues will be a hip hot spot where both locals and students can feel comfortable, free, and healthy. First I have to focus on the social capital I have now, which I am immensely grateful for. Since I am a sophomore my friends are heavily into social media which would be an automatic marketing tool for me. They would help with the promotional and advertising aspect of my business by promoting the café and spreading the word. I am also in cahoots with a company than can act as my supplier with reasonable prices. Furthermore, my father is a business man and my mother is a doctor and health specialist which is basically the perfect combination for this business for when I need advice. Eventually I want to use Got the Blues as a venue for me to put on all sorts of social events, ranging from art showcases, wine tastings, live music shows, and open mics. I want to bring people together-- and unite Gainesville residents that can share this common indulgence.

30A – Final Reflection

What stuck out to me as a formative experience was learning how to pay attention to the environment around me and being able to identify needs and desires and problems within the community around me. I definitely believe that I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset but i definitely have more of one now. Overall, this class has helped me pay more attention to my surroundings. Whenever I encounter an issue or an opportunity I catch myself wondering how it can be changed to make things better, easier, or more accessible to people. There is always an unmet need or want that is waiting to be satisfied. People are typically unsatisfied. The most joyous experience that I am going to remember is writing my first venture concept and noticing how everything fell into place and writing my list of resources and realizing how many I actually have if I wanted to really explore this opportunity. What I would recommend to the future students of this course is to ask a lot of questions and dig into your personal curiosity, take risks at a reasonable cost, learn as much as possible from your failures. Learn from every business related situation because that information will help for the future. Be outgoing with your ideas and marketing strategies. Marketing is everywhere! There are opportunities everywhere! Take advantage of that.

28A – Your Exit Strategy

 

The exit strategy I plan to take is to partner up within 5 years with a larger business that can further help me exploit this opportunity. Most likely expand to other cities and bigger markets. Although my original idea was to sell it to someone that I trust to keep its integrity as a low-key type of spot, as a business-person, this option (if it happens) would make more money and spread the purpose of the venture around larger areas. In the end, I want to spread the love for health and delicious vegan treats to more than just Gainesville. I also believe this concept has a relatively easy to follow skeleton which would make it suitable as a chain. I hadn't thought about my exit strategy prior to this assignment. I guess this whole time, I just imagined that I would pass it on to a friend of mine in order to ensure that nobody changes the business in any ways that would dissatisfy me. My main intention was to keep the genuineness real however considering the latter made me realize the value behind my concept and that other businesses would be waiting to hop on it.

27A – Reading Reflection No. 3

 

Coco Chanel, Lisa Chaney

 

• What surprised you the most?

What surprised me the most about Coco Chanel was her drive to open up her own store as a young woman in 1910 when it was not common at all for women to support themselves and create their own business ventures. 

• What about the entrepreneur did you most admire?

What I admired about this story was that she created her brand in an effort to offer more comfortable clothing options for women. The unmet need that Coco realized was the physical discomfort and impracticality in women's clothing so she supplied suits and "little black dresses" for women that wanted a change.

• What about the entrepreneur did you least admire?

There was nothing that I read in this book that dissatisfied me about Coco Chanel. The one thing that I'm skeptical about is that her first husband was wealthy and obviously helped her a lot to create her first business but then she left him to be with an even wealthier friend of his. I definitely don't dislike this but personally I'll never know if it was for love or for the money.

 

 Did the entrepreneur encounter adversity and failure? If so, what did they do about it?

 

Coco grew up in the French countryside where her mother died when Coco was about 10 years old. Her father abandoned her to an orphanage where nuns taught her how to sew. When Coco was old enough, she started performing as a singer in bigger cities which is where she received her nickname. When she was 20, she was already involved with her first husband and creating her clothing brand.

  2) What competencies did you notice that the entrepreneur exhibited? 

Coco's main competency was her ability to get what she wanted to matter what it took or no matter what societal norms were in place. Coco's advocacy for comfort within luxury was very unapologetically her and was a feminist statement for that time. 

3) Identify at least one part of the reading that was confusing to you.

The main part that was confusing to me was the extent that her two affairs, Etienne Balsan and Arthur Capel, helped her create her first business venture. I wonder if she could have still created her brand without them. I also wonder if she was the "creative" aspect and the men carried the financial and business aspect.  

4) If you were able to ask two questions to the entrepreneur, what would you ask? Why?

If I were able to ask her two questions I would ask what inspiration she used to create her scents and how was able to go about explaining that and getting an accurate representation of whatever she imagined. Another question would be about her love life since Etienne and Arthur were known to be friends. I would be interested to know what their relationships were like and what was the main reason she left Etienne for Arthur. It must have been very difficult for her to make this decision. 

5) For fun: what do you think the entrepreneur's opinion was of hard work? Do you share that opinion?

Since Coco was a very practical and straight-forward woman, I imagine that she was a very willing and dedicated worker. I believe her opinion of hard work would be to do a lot in the field that you are really good at and then have other people take care of the other aspects of the venture. Although, I do agree with this method as efficient, I am the type of person that likes to oversee and make sure everything is running smoothly in all aspects of a project. 
 

26A – Celebrating Failure

When I moved in this semester, to my new apartment, I was disgusted by the ugliness of my room and decided to paint my walls myself and decorate my room. When hanging things on my wall I used command strips. Although a few things fell off the walls, I continued to use command strips to hang things up. A mirror that I purchased and painted myself fell and shattered. I then bought another (smaller) mirror and hung it up with command strips and it fell and broke as well. I finally decided to stop using command strips for heavy things and to use a drill instead of being lazy and looking for the easy way out. 

This experience taught me to not take the easy way out. It is better to put in the extra effort at first to ensure stability and quality so that it does not cause problems in the future. This also taught me to not trust everything I read on packaging. This experience was difficult even though it was a simple fix. It was really frustrating to fail repeatedly and it made me feel awful and like I wasted time and money. Me being stubborn did not help me at all it only caused me to damage more items and waste more of my time. Thankfully, now I realize that this experience was necessary for me to not make these same kind of mistakes in the future. Cheap and easy solutions are not stable ones. I believe this class has helped me see the good in failure and to accept it with open arms so that I can grow and enhance a venture or goal constantly.

24A – Venture Concept No. 1 

Got the Blues Cafe

During my discovery of Butterfly Pea flower, a Southeast Asian plant that has antioxidant and anti-cancerous healing properties, I was registering myself for this class. At first, it was given to me as a gift to use in teas and flavored water. This is when I fell in love with its beautiful color and started to look into it online. Then I conducted a small science experiment with this flower for an assignment and learned a lot about its potential as an enticing food product because it changes color due to acidity which is really cool. I also realized that nobody knew about this flower other than me and people constantly were attracted to it and asked me about it. 

This made me realize the opportunity that I had with this plant to open up a small cafe of my own with a complete line of blue products such as milkshakes, icecreams, pastries, coffee beverages and other beverages. The unmet need is tasty, sweet, and relatively quick options for people that deal with allergies or dietary preferences. I have noticed an overwhelming amount of healthy, vegan, active, and fit students on and around campus that are interested in a good diet. My opportunity is to exploit a low-key food trend as a natural food dye to enhance foods (visually and naturally) in favor of dietary aware or restricted people. The unmet need is tasty, sweet, and relatively quick food options for people that deal with allergies or have dietary preferences. My shop would be located near school to target the increasing number of young students that care about their health but that need to compromise either their health, their wallets, or their taste buds most of the time.

This business idea is innovative because it isn't a new flower at all. This flower has been used for a very long time in other countries for cosmetic, dietary, and healing purposes. However, the flower has made a return and natural dye is taking over the food industry over artificial coloring. This flower contains anthocyanin which is the flavanoid that causes this array of pigments which can range from yellow, red, teal, blue, purple, violet, and pink. Effecting the pH of the solution can cause color changes and due to the internet people have been spreading this around because it looks so nice. I have seen a lot of pinterest posts about it because people really appreciate the aesthetic of it. Many businesses and people have discovered this lately and have been using it to create mocktails and blue lemonade and other things.

My venture concept is to target young and excited people to care (or continue caring) about their health while also indulging in delicious treats that make you feel good. I am using Butterfly Pea flower, a very feminine and sensitive flower, as my main resource to do this. This creates unison and binds the concept throughout. I am using this opportunity as a way to create a community of people that want to share health conscious, locally talented, and aesthetically appreciative times together. I will use my store as a venue and opportunity for cool events and provide a space for people to meet others, study, and enjoy something healthy. People will care because it will be one of the few places to indulge in sweets and grab a coffee while staying healthy and possibly having a cute new location to study. People will pay money for my products because it will be so visually enticing due to its blue and purple hues along with the fact that there aren't that many places around here to get yummy and guilt-free items. Many people (especially students) have dietary restrictions now and there is an increasing number of students that care about fitness and wellness. People that recognize a gluten-free, soy-free, and vegan kitchen and its rarity will spend their money at Got the Blues. 

I believe my most important resource would be my healthy supplies and ingredients that I get from my suppliers because this was my point with coming up with this venture. Healthy options need to be more accessible and the cute store is the vessel/tool in which I will use to supply the products to people. The fact that all my ingredients will be healthy, energizing, vegan, gluten-free, egg-free, and soy-free is what makes this concept so valuable and that'll be thanks to my suppliers that I can really trust and other people can trust. This is very valuable to this specific venture because we will brag about this characteristic of our business a lot. The main need we are supplying is healthy options for people and a menu that is clear and has clean ingredients! Most food & beverage items that are available have many unclear and unhealthy ingredients and usually contain high fructose corn syrup or some variation of it. The whole reason why I chose this venture is because it is too rare and difficult for people to find healthy treats easily with vegan ingredients. This is imitable but requires a lot of work and most places use soy or gluten or eggs in the majority of their stuff. It is difficult to get your kitchen certified organic or gluten-free and not many people would deal with that work.

I really want Got the Blues to be a meeting place where both locals and students can feel comfortable but at first I would have to focus on the social capital I have now which I am really grateful for. Since I am a sophomore my friends are heavily into social media which would be automatic marketing for me which is great. They would help me promote the shop so much and they would tell a lot of people about it because they are social butterflies. I also know a company very well that can be my first supplier and offer me good prices. My father is a business man and my mother is a doctor and health specialist which is basically the perfect combination for this business. Eventually I want to use Got the Blues as a venue for me to put on all sorts of cool events bringing people together and uniting Gainesville residents that can share this common indulgence.