Nervousness, excitement, and anticipation course through us, as we wait for the doors to open at the first annual TREP$ Marketplace event at Little Falls School Number One.
Soap Factory is a business that can benefit everyone. We are the co-founders, Francesca and Sofia. We make coffee soaps and scrubs accompanied by homemade and decorated containers and jars. Due to this year being the first year that our school participated in the TREP$ program, we had an experience that was fully hands on and we had to learn from everything we did. There were no prior experiences in our school that we could look upon for ideas or improvement to the program.
We started our business with no idea about what to create or how the end result would turn out. After many days of thinking, sitting down and really discussing the pros and cons of each idea we decided that the product we were most passionate about was coffee soap. We set about our journey to build our business with the help of some family. Our parents were gracious enough to let us destroy the kitchens and create a mess of our workplace until our products were completed. After finishing the soaps, we decided to also make coffee scrubs and put our extra ingredients to use. We worked for multiple weeks cutting, measuring, gluing, and filling until finally we were finished.
Our products were more targeted toward women and teen girls, so we really expanded on our ideas based on our targeted audience. Though it took a while for us to really see our idea come to life, through hard work and putting in many hours, we perfected our design and were ready to tackle the TREP$ Marketplace at our school.
Upon arrival, we did not realize what a success our products would be. We started out with a classy table, forty five soaps, and twenty four scrubs. When the doors initially opened, we did not have many customers. After about two minutes, the crowd had warmed up to our ideas and saw some things that they liked. As the night moved on we gained confidence purchase by purchase. At one point of the night, we actually had a line at our stand! We worked crazily to keep up with the crowd. As the first hour since the doors were opened came to a close, we had the exciting experience of being the first entrepreneur group in our school to sell out. At that point in our TREP$ experience, we were thrilled with our accomplishments and relieved that we had created something that everyone could and wanted to benefit from.
We had gotten many compliments on our packaging and personal touches and effort displayed on our table. The TREP$ Marketplace was such an enlightening experience for us that we will remember for the rest of our lives. Between the entrepreneur lessons in class and actually putting our knowledge to work, we developed skills that we will be able to use in future experiences as entrepreneurs and as we build our business together.
