Christmas Bazaar
John Keble CE Primary School
Business and Enterprise Project: Autumn 2008
Christmas Bazaar
For this project, Class 4 set up a private company. It cost £10 to rent a stall at the Christmas Bazaar. They then proceeded to make several items to sell: gift bags. Christmas stockings, snowman hand puppets, reindeer and penguin pom poms, a CD of Christmas songs they had written themselves, a song book contain the music and lyrics and the birthday calendar. They were keen to make sure that their products were of a high quality so that they would appeal to the public.
The main focus of this project was for the children to decide how much to sell each product for, and then to work out the profit made on each item.
We decided to pre-order 65 calendars as we have about 70 families in school and we decided that not everyone would buy one and that some families might buy more than one.
The event was well attended and the stall had a steady trade. The pom poms and the CDs sold out completely and approximately half of the stockings and hand puppets sold. The calendars were less popular but they were our most expensive item. We prepared these accounts after the event, using formulas in Excel.
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Product
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Initial outlay
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Quantity sold
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Price per item
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Money taken
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Profit made
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Stall rental
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£10.00
|
|
|
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-£10.00
|
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Pom poms
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£4.50
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58
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£0.20
|
£11.60
|
£7.10
|
|
Snowmen
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£10.00
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16
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£1.00
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£16.00
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£6.00
|
|
Stockings
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£13.00
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19
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£1.50
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£28.50
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£15.50
|
|
Gift Bags
|
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16
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£0.50
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£8.00
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£8.00
|
|
CDs
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£3.00
|
25
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£2.50
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£62.50
|
£59.50
|
|
Books
|
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15
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£1.00
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£15.00
|
£15.00
|
|
Calendars
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£273.00
|
36
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£5.00
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£180.00
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-£93.00
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|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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TOTAL PROFIT
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£8.10
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The children then discussed our successes and failures. The children attributed the success of the CD to the fact that their parents all bought one and that they were cheap enough to make good stocking fillers for grandparents. They were pleased with the profit made on the handmade items because they said it was fun to make them even if they did not all sell. They decided that we had just the right amount of pom poms because the last one sold right at the end of the bazaar.
We discussed the calendars at length. We decided that we had over ordered and that ideally we should have taken orders in advance but we talked about how difficult it would be without a sample product for people to see. We also decided that the Christams Bazaar was probably not the best place to sell them as they were quite expensive. We discussed how as a business we could cut our prices in order to shift our stock but we decided that this would be problematic when we knew our customers so well!
Sucesses: Children set appropriate prices and produced high quality products that would appeal to the public. They experienced and used the language of profit and loss, and produced official accounts.
Areas of development: We ordered too many calendars and /or the bazaar was not the best place to sell them.
Addendum: We put the calendars back on sale at the Christmas production and sold an additional 16 making a total profit of £88.10. We will split this money equally between a charity that the children will choose and the Class 4 Projects Fund.
