Early Earners: Product Research

As you may or may not be aware from previous posts, I'm starting a business with my daughters with the purpose of teaching them about financial literacy, money management, investing, and entrepreneurship. My hope is that this will set them up for success in life If nothing else it will be a way for us to bond.

At this point in our small family business, we are looking at a bunch of different products and testing them for various things such as cost, time commitment, difficulty, and feasibility as a whole.

Here is a list of the products we have tested so far

• Stickers

• Soap

• necklaces/bracelets

• Portable kid straws

On deck for product testing:

• Chapstick

• Candles

• bird houses

• friendship bracelets

We have developed a system that will help us determine what products we will keep and what products we will be getting rid of.

Each product is evaluated individually to see if it actually is worth selling.

Product

cost

shipping

time commitment

difficulty level

profitability

I know what you are thinking, you can probably do all of this without having to buy and do all of that hands on testing, but i woulf beg to differ. I want to teach my girls the importance of being thurough in their research. But, the main reason i decided to actually purchase all of these materias was to see if its something the girls could do themselves or not.

Here are the results of our testing

Stickers:

• Difficulty for a 6 year old: 1

• cost: low

• time commitment: low

• shipping cost: low

• Worth it: yes

• Notes: Easy all around. Will be selling these for sure.

Soap:

Difficulty for a 6 year old: 10

Cost: low

Time Commitment: high

shipping cost: moderate

worth it: no

Notes: Fun to make but needs adult assistance to make due to having to heat up soap base. Production is also restricted because we have limited amount of molds so this could be an issue. This product did not make the cut.

Necklace/Bracelets:

Difficulty for a 6 year old: 3

Cost: low

Time Commitment: low

Shipping cost:

worth it: yes

Notes: Easy to assemble, kids can put it together on their own without any help. This stays.

Portable silicone straws:

Difficulty for a 6 year old: 1

Cost: low

shipping cost: not sure/lowish

profitability: good

Does it stay or does it go: it stays

Notes: This is a cool portable straws that the girls really like. It comes with a straw cleaner. This stays as well.

Just based on the effort it took to make some of the items we tested, i am inclined to believe that similar items are going to have similar results. We have the supplies so we will still test them but........im thinking i know what the results will be.

On top of all of that testing we actually also tried what im going to call a soft sales run at a local family gathering. We didnt get any sales because no one had cash on them but many people have venmo, so what did we learn? Open a venmo account! Although we didnt get any sales my daughter got really excited because everyone was telling her how great it was that she has a business. That really pumped her up and got her even more motivated to work on her business and finding more products to add to her list.

Stay tuned for updates!