Product Development Lesson: Abigail's Purse

A little over a year ago I sat with my daughter after dinner one night and we chatted about entrepreneurship. She was 13 going on 14 but she understood the concept and started to run with it. We talked about what would be a good product. She was going through a very crafty phase. Not crafty as in mischievous, but crafty as in she was painting, building origami, and making artsy things. She enjoyed it and I suggested we should find one of those craft projects that other people might like and turn it into something people would like to buy. We decided one particular project had promise. The craft project was a handbag woven with plastic strips.

She got to work trying to change a craft project into a product. The first discussion was the materials. I told her we were never going to be able to find plastic strips, but we looked on the internet anyway. Nothing was available. I thought we would have to have the strips made for us specifically. So we started talking about alternatives to plastic strips. She came up with using ribbon instead. I liked it because I thought it would make the purse soft and warm vs the cold hard plastic. So we made a trip to Michael's and purchased a ton of ribbon. Problem number two, we had to find a better supplier of ribbon, Michael's was expensive.

She started making the purse out of ribbon and quickly found the next problem. Ribbon doesn't stand up like plastic does. Being the trooper that she is, she tried to make that work as hard as she could. Finally she mentioned that she was having a problem. She needed some kind of support system to allow her to weave. We spent a week or two thinking about this problem and talking about solutions. We tried a couple and failed and some how ended up ruining the ribbon.

This time we went to Joanne's for the ribbon. Who knew ribbon would be so expensive. We got a couple of blocks of styrofoam from Michael to serve as the support system. We cut the styrofoam to the size of the purse, wrapped it in plastic wrap and off Abigail went to build another purse.

This time it was a success. We talked about the fit and finish, it needed a liner, and some kind of tough base. What we ended up with was the purse you see above. I thought it was pretty awesome. She started using it to carry all of her dance gear. And then we stopped working on the purse.

Yesterday we were walking through Wal-Mart and we saw rows and rows of woven bags. A year has gone by since we started working on the purse. But the first thing Abigail said to me when she saw the purses, "They found the plastic strips." The bags are bigger. They are for going to the beach. They are rugged and cold. And they are $7. Each of Abigail's purses were in the $30 range just in ribbon.

The night before the trip to Wal-Mart Abigail mentioned she was ready to do the purses again. That night I searched for ribbon again and I purchased a ton of ribbon that I had found very cheap, 1/40th the cost of Michael's and Joanne's. The ribbon will show up some time soon, and we will make a couple more purses. Hopefully someone on eBay will find them as wonderful as we do and pay a decent price for them.

Lessons:
* Someone always has the same idea
* Get your product out as quickly as you can
* Keep searching for lower cost materials (without sacrificing quality of course)