A report on the profitability, management and where we aspire to go next in our business

1. Seedling
Interim Company Report
Dulwich College & Sydenham High School
South Central Area, Southwark borough (LO402)
Centre Lead: Hermione Taylor
Advisor: Nicholas Gould (African Prisons Project)

2. Executive Summary
Product
Our product is a range of eco-friendly greetings cards, which leave a lasting impression
on whoever uses them. Our cards are made from recycled paper, that has flower seeds
embedded in it. When our seed cards are planted and watered, the seeds sprout up from
inside the paper and grow into a beautiful patch of flowers, creating an alternative to throwing
your old cards away that is both environmentally beneficial and aesthetically pleasing.
Mission Statement
Our mission is to change the world’s attitude towards planting and the recycling of materials
by delivering high-quality and well-designed products that test the limits of the industry
through offering users new functionality and increasing the product’s positive impact on the
Earth.
Financial Summary
Seedling has issued £130 worth of shares. The total number of cards sold is 466. Net
sales to date are £1050 and after deducing all costs and taxes, the net profit for the period
amounts to £479.
Company Performance Statement
Seedling has come a great journey from 12 people with nothing, but the strong will to
succeed, to the company with an innovative product that can change the public’s opinion
on reusability, make the people learn the (forgotten by many) skills of planting and possibly
change the Earth to the better. Throughout the whole time of our existence together we
learned the importance of cooperation and communication, whilst each individual gained role-
specific skills that can be useful on the future job.
Contents:Executive Summary
The Team
The Beginning
Product Development
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Sales and Marketing
Finance
The Future
Page 8
Page 10
Page 10
Seedling

3. The Managing Director — Dmitry Rusanov: «I would like to thank all of our team members for
putting in so much time, effort and enthusiasm to make our company flourish! I have always been
encouraging our company to move forward into being the best one. Now it’s time for the judges to
decide whether my leadership was successful or not.»
We are always taking decisions based on what every team member thinks and everyone has a right
to propose or veto any decision. We should also add that during the periods of fairs and production
we were forgetting about our roles and we were cutting and selling our cards altogether! We are
currently thinking of salaries that could be payed to our team to reward them for their intensive job;
we’re trying balance the salaries with the amount of money that we need for the development of our
company.
Full of the team spirit we move on to the next section: The Beginning
The Beginning
The first task we set ourselves was to create a set of deadlines for the next 8 months, from the
company launch to the day of the competition. Through the consultation with our teachers and peers
who did it last year as well as our adviser we concluded that the most important milestone for our
company was to raise enough money through fundraising to be able to sell our product. At that point
we didn’t have an idea we could work upon, but this fundraising kept our hopes alive.
Firstly, the administration director read through all the rules and pointed out at the aspects we should
take into account. We issued some of our stocks and started thinking about the fund-raising. One
of the best ideas that came to our mind was to sell food at our schools during the breaks and the
lunchtimes. We chose this way of raising capital because it wouldn’t interrupt us from our academic
priorities and our ‘client base’ was big: we had more than 1500 students in two schools combined.
We had to negotiate with the catering departments in our schools and with the food selling
companies so that we have both the legitimate permission and great margins. Altogether, during a
month we did 5 sales and raised £158, which with the money that we gained from selling 130 shares
of our company was more than enough to buy all the needed materials for the start of production.
However, what was even more important to us, we made lots of middle school boys and girls happy
with a change to the usual food they were used to eating every day creating a friendly brand for our
company.
At the same time we started our role division. We had a competition for the role of the managing
director, so the candidates had to pitch and then the managing director was chosen by a vote. For
all the other roles team members distributed themselves uniformly based on everybody’s qualities,
interest and agreement by other members.
After we finished our role division we started thinking of what we were going sell at the Sydenham
and Dulwich College Christmas fairs.
From this came the progression into a perfected prodcut: Product Development
The Team
We would like to start our story with our team. We think that the Young Enterprise Company of The
Year competition isn’t about the products or profits; it’s about the teamwork and our development
both as a company and as individuals. Each of our team members was equally important and all of
us made great progress since September and the company massively benefitted from it.
Our team started with 6 girls from Sydenham High School and 6 boys from Dulwich College.
Unfortunately, due to a very extensive academic curriculum two members had to leave our team.
Luckily, we accepted another student into our team and today there are 11 of us.
Having team members from two distinct schools wasn’t as easy as if we were all studying in one
place. We couldn’t simply talk to each other during lunch, so we made an extensive use of our group
chat on Facebook as well as having to be as efficient as possible during our group meetings once a
week.
Here’s the list of all members of Seedling divided into departments as for the 17th March:
Operations:
Ella Bright (Director), Juliette Clark, Zoe Maccormack, Oscar Wood — they were the most
hardworking team in the whole company: they had to create the original product, find the right
suppliers and then, based on the results of our researches develop the product for it to appeal to a
bigger audience.
Finance:
Alex Brose (Director) — this team was small, but very important: Alex and the Managing Director
had to write the business plan at the beginning of our journey, then keep track of our Profit & Loss
Account and Balance Sheet. Every meeting Alex was reporting on how good our financial situation
was, so that every team member stayed informed.
Sales:
Marco Verdino (Director) — Marco was making sure that we attend as many fairs as possible and
that our product becomes more and more appealing to the customers every time we sell it. His
sales goals were high but we managed to achieve all of them. Now he is in negotiations with the
companies that want to buy our seed cards in large quantities.
Marketing:
Luke Henderson (Director) — Luke started with writing the marketing plan for our company and then
he was a key person in figuring out what design would be best to sell at each fair. Luke and Marco
were working together most of the time to collaborate their market research and develop a marketing
strategy using events, social media and face-to-face communication with our customers and target
audience.
Information Technology:
Roshan Patel (Director) — without Roshan we would never be able to scan our designs in. He also
did a great job in pursuing Luke’s strategy in the SMM (social media marketing).
Administration:
Eleanor Michael (Director) — Eleanor helped us a lot in keeping all of our documents safe, protocoling
each of our meetings, making sure that we were not breaking the Young Enterprise regulations and
making sure each of us remembers what he/she should do for the next week.
Human Resources:
Eleanor Jeffery (Director) — Eleanor was always trying to keep us enthusiastic, even when two
members left our team or when we were left with no seed cards for the Southfields Market fair. She
was always dividing the duties, so that everyone has the same impact on the company’s present and
future and nobody is working more than the others. She recommended us to have more people in the
Operations department because they had more jobs than for any other department. Eleanor was also
recommending many lectures from the Ted talks (online lecture theatre) and specialised courses from
Coursera.org and Edx.org (online educational projects with certificates) to increase our team
members’ understanding of their particular roles in the company.
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4. Product Development
First ideas
Our main goal for our product was to be beneficial to people’s lives and to be environmentally friendly
as well as being a product which can be mass-produced quickly using division of labour and to be
financially successful. We came up with lots of ideas!
The first one that really appealed to us was a charger protector, which would prevent the cord from
splitting at the neck of the charger. All the team members spent a couple of weeks researching and
refining this idea. With the help of the market research we found that we would have to use acrylic in
order for it to be effective, therefore making the product not so eco-friendly, more expensive and time
consuming to produce as it could not be made locally. We also found out that there were already DIY
tutorials easily accessible online hence it wasn’t very innovative as we first thought. Asking between
two schools and families we found that the idea only appealed to a specific age group, 13-17 year
olds. Upon discussing this in our meeting we came to the conclusion that we would not pursue this
idea, pivoting to our next idea!
Our product
It was then that a seed was planted into our minds, which grew into an idea to create a twist on
traditional greeting cards where seeds would flourish into flowers when the card was planted after
use. Our product would become more personal to the recipient as the flower can develop with the
person.
Environment
We chose to develop this idea, as it could be really beneficial to our environment! Every year 879
million cards are sold in the UK only*, and most of them are sent to the landfills. With our unique seed
cards we could save tonnes of paper cards from being thrown away after a couple of days, without
any true meaning to the acquaintance.
Testing the idea
Our financial and marketing departments conducted a market research and found that the market
for greeting cards is astonishingly big: in 2014 there were sold 879 million greeting cards with a
total value of £1.4 billion. And the market is also growing at a rate of 7.77% year over year. It also
supported our original plan for having a ready-to-sell product by the Christmas fairs as Christmas
cards is the single biggest category of greeting cards.* Another benefit of this product is that it could
be sold all year round, changing our product to the welfare of the consumer and bought by everyone
whether that is for birthdays or to wedding anniversaries. Before starting to create prototypes we
asked more than 200 people of what they think about our idea; luckily, a vast majority of answers
was positive. From the obtained responses we also concluded that our target audience were females
aged 30 and above.
(*) The information is provided by the Greeting Card Association, data of 2014.
Prototyping process
The operations department with the help of the other team members started working on several
prototypes to prove that our product is viable. They came with two major different designs:
1) Seeds are between two sheets of soluble paper - this design would let put any seeds we
wanted, but it wasn’t very aesthetically appealing and would take more to be produced.
2) Seeds embedded soluble paper itself - this design was less versatile to designs and pricier,
but would save time on production.
After we discussed the two prototypes, we chose the second one because it was very beautiful and
we thought that the greeting cards in the eye of the customer were all about the beauty and quality
meant a higher profit in the future.
Production process
Our first idea was to create our own paper from recycling paper that was used by our schools;
however due to the small time period (we had only 6 weeks until the Sydenham Christmas fair) we
couldn’t produce all the resources ourselves and create the optimum quantity we felt we needed
to sell. With this in mind, to save production time using internal economies of scale, we looked into
companies that supplied their own seeded paper. The operations department did a great job in
finding a supplier that could offer low prices, so that we could increase our profit from every card we
sell. among many others they found one that produced seeded paper that was locally sourced in
Hertfordshire, so our product was 100% British with saving on the delivery time and costs too.
Financial component
Through early projections the financial department concluded that the predicted cost of production
was in between 80 pence and 1 pound. As part of our marketing research we found out that most of
the shops were selling normal greeting cards for about £2. We wanted our margin to be above 50%
so we decided to try out the price of £2.50 and change it in the future if we find that we calculated
the demand/supply ratio incorrectly.
Product evolution
We started to design cards that could be laser cut however upon testing we discovered that the
process of laser cutting kills the seeds inside the cards and our designs were limited as they would
have had to be in a silhouette. We would of also had to buy an added amount of paper to create a
card, further inflating our costs.
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5. Our first design was influenced by Christmas as it was near to our first selling opportunity. We
created 5 different designs based around recognisable christmas objects, and included small
contemporary styled christmas greetings. The layout for the actual cards was created in the Microsoft
Publisher that enabled us to enhance the cards by putting a our
logo and the QR-code, which leads to our Facebook page, on the
back of each card.
We decided to present our cards wrapped in twine rope with recycled brown C6 envelopes. It gave the
cards the charming look that appealed to a lot of our customers. We were putting every card into the
envelope and wrapping it with twine rope by ourselves, so that we could check that every card satisfies
our quality standards: the image quality is good, card is not wrinkled and there are no defects in the
paper, envelope or twine rope.
Our next large season that we were to design for was Valentines Day, where we created a more
intricate flower design, that could be sold as a general greeting card too. This way we could cater for
a wider target audience, attracting more customers.
We think that the combination of our beautiful designs with the innovative idea of plantable seed
cards was the main reason for our success as a company. However, we love our product mostly
because our seed cars give pleasure both to the people who buy and to the people who receive
them.
For the last fair that we were planning
to attend we developed a new design
for the Birthday cards. Unfortunately,
due to the difficulties with our seed
paper provider we could not produce
enough of the new cards to be
profitable after paying for paper, its
delivery and fair entrance fee.
This last design brings us to the
next part of our story: Sales and
Marketing
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6. Sales and MarketingFrom our market research we knew that the seed cards that were being well explained made almost
everyone willing to buy at least one (most people even bought 3 or 5 cards). Our first selling
opportunity was a fair at Sydenham High School in early December 2015. Despite being placed at
one of the least attended corners, we sold over 100 cards. We then attended 3 other fairs in the next
3 months. Overall our sales exceeded both our and our advisor’s expectations —we sold over 450
cards altogether, meaning we represented around 0.0002% of the total number of cards sold in the
UK during that period*! We were also very proud to receive two awards, at Euroclear Trade Fair and
at the Spitalfields Market, for the best and most innovative product award.
The main objective (after the market research) for the Marketing department was to create a brand
for our company in the eyes of our customers. They started with creating a logo that would represent
our values: it is deliberately hand-drawn, so that the customer has a feeling that he/she is buying a
very special and high-quality product. The flower represents our main product and the hills are the
deforested places that we want to fill with trees and flowers. Then they created the proposals for the
name of our company. We spent an hour choosing the one that all of us appreciated: Seedling.
The marketing department then cooperated with the information technology department to create a
Seedling Facebook page that let us communicate with customers, posting news about our progress
and photos of our happy customers. On the back of each of our seed cards we put a QR-code that
leads to our Facebook page, so that our customers and the people who receive our seed cards
could find out more about us. Other time was spent on communicating with customers and making
suggestions on how to improve our product.
Market research
The marketing plan that we developed was focused on large amount of interactions with the
customer both in person and in the social media to make our product more relevant to the customers
and make our brand more recognisable among the members of the public.
Our sales and marketing department spent a huge amount of time conducting market research that
changed our view on our target audience, helping correct the prices for each fair and adjust the
product itself, after the first fair at the Sydenham High School we decided to sell the sets of 5 cards,
so that the customer could have all of our designs, for a cheaper price per card. That decision payed
off: more than 50% of our sales at the Dulwich College fair were in form of sets. At the future fairs we
continued using the same strategy adjusted to the number of designs we had and the buying abilities
of our customers.
Each time we interacted with customers, we made sure to ask them what they thought of our
product, what was wrong with it, and how we could improve it in the future. Our findings helped
us develop our product throughout the course of the year, and lead to the addition of a set of
instructions, as well as our Valentine’s Day range and our flower designs, that were not specific
towards any particular occasion. For each fair, based on our findings, we were changing the prices.
We expected to find that our cards would sell better with the demographic of females aged 30 and
up, however, we were surprised to discover that they actually sold fairly evenly between the sexes,
and that the age band that seemed most enthusiastic towards our cards was the group aged
between 16 – 21, but the majority of our actual sales went to adults in their twenties. We adjusted
our designs to accommodate these findings, creating several designs that were friendlier towards the
younger generation during the Valentine’s Day period, which increased the amount of cards we sold.
We also discovered that the type of envelope used makes a big difference to the amount of sales
that were made. At one trade fair, we had both standard white envelopes, as well as more earthy
brown envelopes. We found that the brown envelopes were taken much quicker, and several people
sited that the white envelopes ruined the eco-friendly USP of the cards. We have used these brown
envelopes at all times since.
(*) The information is provided by the Greeting Card Association, data of 2014.
Every new proposition in terms of the product or sales strategy was checked, using A/B testing
(testing in which two different versions of the product or the same product with different prices is
shown to similar customers and the number of sales using each of the two versions is recorded;
the one that is selling better is then applied to all the customers) to ensure that we take the right
decisions about the changes that we make to the product and to the selling strategies.
We’re now in negotiations with two shops that are willing to buy large quantities of our cards.
We’re also considering creating specific designs for big orders and gradually making more use of a
business-to-business model (a model in which the company is oriented to selling its products and
services to other companies, rather than to individuals), as one gallery outside of the UK sated that
they were willing to buy our cards to sell as souvenirs at their shop. We also believe this could lead to
a further expansion of our company name.
The marketing and sales initiatives let us
achieve economies of scale to gain as
much profit as possible, leading to our
penultimate section: Finance
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7. Finance
Seedling (A branch of Young Enterprise)
Interim profit & loss account for the period
1st October 2015 to 17th March 2016
Interim balance sheet at 17th of March
I have reviewed the accounts of the company and agree that the above figures are accurate
representation of the company’s position.
Signed:............................................ Date:..........................
(Nicholas Gould - Advisor)
The FutureOur company achieved great success in the first 6 months since our start back in September 2015.
It’s proved by the amount of seed cards that we sold, the two prizes that we received; the fact that
we are profitable has displayed our huge accomplishments. However, we still wish we could have a
bigger impact on our planet by reaching out with our product to more people. Therefore, in the next
12 months we want to increase our sales by 30 times (to around 12000 seed cards) by cooperating
with shops and becoming more focused on the business-to-business model, whilst also opening an
online shop for the people to be able to buy our seed cards from all over the UK. We will then be able
to set up our own production facility and create the seed paper ourselves by recycling used paper
from schools, universities and offices. We’re planning to introduce new product categories and within
36 months to produce 1% of all the cards in the UK (around 900,000 cards); this expansion should
result in revenue of more than £1 million.
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