Click here and check out page 22 to learn how Miranda Cosgrove is an entrepreneur too!

 

 

Hello!  My name is Ryan Jordan and I am 11 years old and I participated in Westbrook School's TREP$ Marketplace in West Milford, N.J.  I came up with an idea when I was looking at my miniature Boston houses I made for my Cub Scout Blue and Gold dinner a few years ago.  Every one liked them there, so I decided to make them for TREP$, except the buildings would be of West Milford.  Since there are lots of bears in town, I thought it would be cute if each was stamped with a bear.  That led to me naming my business "Bears Around Town."

            The most fun part was selling my product at the Marketplace.  I really enjoyed the fact that everyone was commenting at what a good idea it was.  My biggest challenge was getting the drawings done in time.  Near the end I almost thought that I was going to run out of time to draw!

            I would love to continue my business because I had a great time and loved the feeling selling my products gave me.  When people came up to me, they mostly looked at my products and then started to comment and ask me questions on how I made them.  The most said comment was how cute the little bear stamps were.  This made me feel great.  It always brought a smile to my face. 

            One of my products was the bike shop in town.  A customer came up and said to her son, "Look, they even have Town Cycle!"  She later said that she owned it with her husband.  She bought one.  Of course I gave her a discount.  I got a custom order for a church in town and another customer wanted me to draw her house.

After the marketplace I gave one of my St. Joseph's churches to my pastor and at mass he showed it to the church.  I got 6 orders after mass.  That was totally unexpected. 

            In the end, I made an $86.00 profit.  I only had $20.00 for my expenses, but we were using scrap wood and paint, so it really kept my costs down.  TREP$ encouraged me that maybe I could continue this business after the market place.  TREP$ is something that I will do every year after this.

 

 

My name is Lindsey Renna and I am an 11-year-old student at Westbrook School.  I am also a competitive dancer and we dancers work very hard.  We keep all of our many dance shoes in a sort of gym bag, and since we all work so hard, we also share a common problem...a very smelly dance bag!   So I knew I could use my TREP$ experience to help with this problem!  I wanted to make gym bag deodorizers!  I thought this would be great not only for dance bags, but gym bags, sock drawers and lockers too.

 

At first my idea was to just use square pieces of cloth, filled with baby powder, and sewn closed.  My mom was afraid that the baby powder would come through the cloth though.  So we had to think of other ideas.

 

My next idea was to use baby socks instead of cloth squares, but we still had the problem of the baby powder coming through the sock.  I liked the baby sock idea (since socks kind of go with gym bags), so I had to come up with another idea for scenting them.   At this point, I also came up with the name for my business:  "Smelly Socks".

 

I decided to search the internet and stores for fragrance beads.  However, this turned out to be a very expensive way to go.  I knew I had to keep my product priced under $5.  I asked my parents to help me with other ideas.

 

My dad suggested we try to fill the socks with rice.  Rice wouldn't go through the fabric sock and it wasn't very expensive.  We just needed to scent it somehow.  Now, it was time to experiment!   We put some uncooked rice on a paper plate and mixed it with some pine-scented fragrance oil that my mom had left over from Christmas.  It made the rice look very wet, and I was beginning to think that this would not work.  We left it overnight to see if it would dry.

 

The next morning, I checked on my paper plate full of rice and it was dry!  It also smelled great!  Finally, we were getting somewhere! 

 

I bought several cute little baby socks and different fragrance oils at a store.  I decided to change the name of the scent that appeared on the bottle's label.  After all, I knew my product had to appeal to the kids that would be buying it.  So, I changed "Citrus" to "Lemonade" and "Apple" to "Candy Apple" and so on.  

 

I think this idea work well, since "Candy Apple" was the first to sell out at Marketplace!  In fact, people came to my Smelly Socks booth and asked for certain scents like "Cupcake" because they heard it from a friend.  Word was spreading and I was excited!  I sold almost all of my product.  I gave some of the left over "Smelly Socks" to my friends at dance, since they were my inspiration.

 

TREP$ was a fun experience!  Not only did I learn some things along the way, I was able to solve a problem and make a little spending money too.  Disney World, here I come!