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TY Mini CoMpanies

GoA ACCeSSoRieS

Transition Year students are encouraged to divide into groups and
brainstorm ideas for new products and set up their own business. This is
what we call a mini company. Our mini company group, GOA ACCESSORIES,
made up of 3 people including Gift Kelvin, Oreoluwa Odumosu and Agnes
Olatunji, decided to design a product that we could sell.
We came up with the idea of charm bracelets that had inspirational
words like ‘hope’ and ‘courage’. We also made fabric clothed shoes
and rubber band bracelets .Instead of keeping the profit for ourselves
we donated 50% of our total profit to two charities.

We gave the bracelets in our own school, but as we had left over
materials we gave to close friends and family because we didn’t
want o waste them.
Overall our mini company was a great success and a great learning
experience. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our mini
company teacher Mr. Robertson for all his help and advice during
the course of the year.

jiGGy wiTH iT

Our Transition Year Mini Company has eight members: Philip Pollock, Eoin
Hannick, Nigel Kells, Keiju Murata, Adam Smyth, Joshua Hall, Edward McNeill
and Promise Adekola.

We have based our product around education and also sport. Our main idea
is educational animal jigsaws for pre-school and early primary school pupils.
The concept is that their hand-eye co-ordination will improve and also the
multiple coloured pieces will appeal to them.
As part of another product targeting a more mature audience, we decided to print the logos of sports
teams onto wood for decoration. We used the Micro-Reuter
in the Technology room to do this for us. It was an incredibly
efficient process as we could get 1 logo every 10 minutes.
We sold our products to friends and family and also before
Christmas we attended a couple of craft fairs.
We found that the logos were by far the better sellers. The
jigsaws slowly began to become a burden because of the
multiple processes required to make them attractive.

We entered into two Mini company competitions and had
great fun competing at the Cavan Student Enterprise awards
I The Slieve Russell hotel in March.
We learned that sometimes the simplest ideas can be the most effective.

The Royal Times 2013-2014 59