Creating a Product to Sell

Mini Brief

 For this brief, I have set my self the task to design, create and market a hypothetical product that could be sold in one of the shops I have researched or in my own shop eventually. I want to keep the theme of the product in line with my own creative personality and brand. I will plan out the steps and propose how I would get this product manufactured including costs and then how I would price up, market the product on the online shop, in an in-person shop and how I would promote it on social media.

For my mini brief I mindmapped all the products I’d like to eventually sell that are all fairly easy to produce and easy to put a custom design on and make it my own. I chose to design a sticky note. This is a widely used and useful product that can be versatile in its design. They’re small and cheap and can be handy anywhere in the house or office or even in a bag on the go if you’re forgetful like me and like to make notes.
After choosing a product, I then researched other sticky notes out there and the standard measurements. I looked what is commonly used on sticky note designs and that consisted of lines, check boxes, a prompt at the top for what to use the sticky notes for e.g. shopping list, to do list and a design that usually takes up the space of a border. I then listed some of my favourite themes to illustrate and the one I decided would fit best on a sticky note was a food themed shopping list design. This could also link really well to my final year uni project which is a fridge themed recipe box and this could be used as a promotional or freebie accompanying product.

The next step was choosing a colour scheme and narrowing down the food theme design. I chose some cool toned blue and green palettes and drew out some designs. I chose to design one as a fridge with a shopping list one, a plainer one with small food illustrations and another plainer one but this time with a grass themed border and carrots dotted about. After choosing to go with this design I drew it out with more care and detail.

After finalising the design and what the product will look like, the next part is finding a manufacturer and working out costs.
If this was a real product I was producing for my shop, I would consider posting the design to social media, such as Instagram stories where I could gather feedback and opinions and get a feel of it it’s a viable product that would sell. If the feedback is positive I would then go ahead with manufacturing.

There are lots of options out there to get any product custom made. Some sites will give you more freedom and you can create specific products that are die-cut to shape. The other factor is how many they require to purchase as a minimum and this is normally fifty to one hundred but sites like these will usually reduce the individual item price the more you buy. I will have to consider carefully when starting out my shop to buy the right amount that I can afford but still sell enough to make the money spent back again and with profit which can go towards my own salary and then back in to new products.

Here is a site I found that makes custom sticky notes and gives plenty of options:

https://www.everythingbranded.co.uk/promotional-paper-products/printed-paper-products/sticky-notes

Lastly I mocked up what my illustration and design would look like as a instagram product post. I really like how this looks and I can’t wait to start posting these for real!