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TREP$
| 10 Tips Help Kids Choose the Right Products
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Look What's In This Issue!
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Dear Friends,
How can we make this the best TREP$ Year yet? How can we inspire the kids to invest their energy and innovate? We have been learning from each other over the years, and we at TREP$ were really excited by what we saw at the TREP$ Marketplaces we attended last year, but we want to encourage even more this year! Inside this issue you will find "TEN Tips to Help Kids Choose the Right Product" - many of these thoughts came from conversations with you! Also, there are SIX stories about young entrepreneurs we met last year in your schools. Did you know ANY young entrepreneur can send me his/her story to be included? Encourage the kids you know to make submissions! Keep the feedback coming so that we can be most helpful to you! What would you like to see in the next newsletter? Send your ideas to pdewaal@trepsed.com. Keep up the good work and remember to lean on us when you need a helping hand. Pamela deWaal
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IT'S YOUR TURN TO WIN IN
The TREP$...
"Facebook Likes" Challenge!
You're going to love this!!! Last year we offered a new challenge that can win your school a gorgeous TREP$ banner to hang at your marketplace while helping more people learn about the TREP$ Facebook Page and all that it has to offer.
So here's the contest: You request a 24 hour period (of your choosing) for your school's contest. In that 24 hour period, your school gets credit for every "like" that the TREP$ Facebook Page gets. We will prepare a graphic with something like "Help Haynesville Win!" with instructions of how everyone can help. Let us know what 24 hour period you would like! 
Click here to send us your 24 hour requested time.
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10 Tips to Help Kids Choose the Right Product
As Young Entrepreneurs You Should...
- Consider your audience. Do some research. Is it mostly kids or adults shopping? What is the right price point? Is it a town that is sports oriented? music?
- Create your product by thinking of a need that isn't being met.
- Avoid making a food product unless you are a passionate future chef.
- Try your hardest to be practical. People are looking for products they can really use. You have to think of their needs first.
- Avoid limiting your experience to being a reseller unless you have very limited time. You will learn some things, but other lessons will be missed when you skip the production stage.
- Ask adults about product fads they have seen over the years- Would they be popular if you revived them?
- Look through your recycling bin and see if there is anything you have easy access to that could be turned into a sale-able product.
- Explore the web for product ideas. "how-to" sites, "Pinterest", "DIY" sites, kids craft sites, "Etsy", etc. (Google "recycle yogurt containers" for example)
- Walk through a parts store/home improvement store and think about how you could use inexpensive parts to make something else. (pendants for necklaces hung on inexpensive string...)
- Be an opportunist. Do you know someone who has scraps they throw away at work that could become a great product? Could you use discarded pallet-wood? Or old staircase spindles? Scraps of wood from the high school woodshop? Just start asking around!
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How Can We Make OUR Facebook Page
YOUR Favorite Facebook Page?
We work very hard to fill our Facebook Page with great articles and photos from every marketplace we attend. We really want the page to become a forum where our parents and teachers can seek feedback about their ideas, and seek ideas to overcome their obstacles.
Help Us Make This Happen! Visit the page often, and post your comments and questions on our timeline! It's YOUR Page.
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 DISRUPTUS Encourages Innovation
At TREP$ we know that encouraging innovation is imperative when teaching entrepreneurship. So, when we see a game like this one, we have to spread the word!
Disruptus™ - The Game Designed to Open Every Mind.The concept was to get players practicing how to innovate by using 100 simple, everyday objects or scenes, each depicted on a card. As the focus of the game, they broke down the concept of innovation into what they felt were four important parts - which then became the basic "moves" of the game:
CREATE2 Take element(s) from each of 2 different images and create a new object/idea
IMPROVE Look at an image and add or change elements to make the object/idea better
TRANSFORM Look at an image and place it into a different context where it gains a new purpose
DISRUPT Look at the picture, grasp what is the purpose, and come up with a completely different way to achieve the same purpose
More Info |
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 TREP$ Facilitator Tells All!
Glen Ridge has been offering TREP$ for years, and Christine is one of their inspirational, energetic workshop facilitators. Click on the Link to see what happens when you hand an experienced teacher a microphone. In her unrehearsed, unscripted testimonial, she eloquently describes the TREP$ program at Glen Ridge, New Jersey's Ridgewood Avenue School. Watch it! |
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TREP$ Spotlights
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Young Entrepreneurs Telling Their Stories
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Meet six of the 'treps we met as we visited TREP$ Marketplaces last year at our participating schools. These are just a sampling of our Innovators. Thinkers. Expense Minimizers. Recyclers. Smart Business People! We are so proud of their hard work and their successes. Next issue you can look forward to meeting Jeremy, Ashley, Amanda and Alleyna!
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This young entrepreneur filmed at his TREP$ Marketplace and posted it on youtube! Click here to watch his video.
My name is Michael and I am a 12 year old from Lounseberry Hollow Middle School. My product is Custom Legos which I create by adding clay and paint to an ordinary Lego figure. I customize the Lego figure to create my favorite TV, video game, and movie characters. A lot of people love Legos. It doesn't matter what the age. This business came out of my love for creating. Every since I was just a little boy, I would wake up in the morning and draw and create things in my art room with Play doh and Legos. As I got older I stumbled across Mr. Orange Lego on Youtube. He inspired me to create my first Custom Lego using materials that I had never thought of before. So I made Super Mario. I advanced from using things like white out, sharpie markers, and air dry clay to using Sculpty oven clay and acrylic paint. Read More
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My name is Ariana and I go to Lounsberry Hollow Middle School. For my TREPS product at first I wanted to make picture holders. But to my disappointment by the time I would havepaid for all of my supplies I would lose more than I make.
I had to quickly come up with something else so I looked to my dad for help. Because of his counter top business, Buccieri's Custom Countertops we decided to make cutting boards out of his scraps.
Though the process for making a cutting board is rewarding, it's also very difficult. There are many complicated steps to finally get the finished product. We purposely spread out the work between two days, but both of them hard and long. When we were finally done I felt very relieved.
My favorite part of TREPS though, was the market place. I loved... Read More
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My name is Bobby and I am a 6th grader at Reverend Brown School. For TREP$ Marketplace, I had thought of making food or soap originally but then decided to make candles.
I originally thought of making very colorful, bright candles using crayons. My mother said maybe people would not like burning chemicals and dyes. I started thinking about using organic and all natural ingredients instead. I decided to scent them with spices and herbs instead of using scented oils and dyes. I decided on 3 scents, vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg, and, my mother's suggestion, rosemary and sage. I named my business Bobby's All Natural Candles.
My mother helped me buy natural soy wax, all cotton string, and organic cinnamon sticks, organic nutmeg, organic rosemary, organic sage, and all natural Madagascar vanilla beans...
Read More
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My name is Hugo, I'm in seventh grade at Reverend Brown School. I attended the TREP$ program this year; it was a wonderful experience for me. I originally wanted to do a partnership with my friend. I soon realized the free time I had did not match my friend's. I then knew that the partnership would not work.
I found it very difficult to decide what to make.
One evening watching the news, a reporter was talking about recycling. I decided to include recycled materials in my product. I chose to make leather bracelets by using leather from a damaged suitcase my parents had. I also made slap bracelets by using recycled tape measures, left over seasonal slap bracelets, and duct tape with sport teams and other designs. My business was called Hugo's Leather and Slaps.
When I started making the slap bracelets, the first ones were difficult to make...
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My name is Joshua; I am 11 years old, and I go to Stillman School. I've been looking forward to doing TREP$ for a long time. Ever since going to last year's TREP$ market place at Stillman, I've been telling everyone that I'm selling comic books at TREP$ 2013! My idea was to make an original comic and sell copies of them.
When we started planning for TREP$ back in December for our February 5, 2013 marketplace, I got so excited! I imagined my friend Matthew and me at our booth, with everyone crowding around to get our original comics! I wanted to be partners with Matthew because I didn't want to go through the TREP$ experience alone, and he liked the idea of making original comics, too. For our TREP$ market, we worked together on a story about a hero fighting his enemy and his minions: "The Golden Phantom"...
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My name is Jeremy and I am a 6th grader at Ridgewood Avenue School. For my product, I made bowls out of raffle tickets rolls. I originally wanted to make wooden swords like the ones I bought in Scotland last summer. I figured out that it was too time consuming and thought that people might start fighting with them and they would break. In the past I had made bowls
from rolls of tickets as teacher gifts so I decided that's what I would sell instead.
My mom and I researched places to order inexpensive ticket rolls since in the office stores they would be too expensive for me to make a profit. I ordered all blank red tickets and was going to stamp my town name around the top of each bowl. When the box arrived, there were only 3 reds and the rest were miscellaneous other colors! They had no more red in stock but sent us some "admit one" rolls for free...
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