When preparing to sell her handmade jewelry at the Business Innovations pop-up shop, where students sold the products they made in class, sophomore Anna Overall said she was excited to see the reaction of customers seeing her product.

“I was looking forward to making some sales as well as seeing the reactions of others when they sell,” Overall said. “Something that went well was that we made lots of new pieces and me and Emelia Johnson, my CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), had a lot of fun.”

Business Innovations teacher Abigail Lugo said she decided to start the pop-up shop in order for students to have the chance to sell their products to people outside of the school.

“This is the first year we did it. I wanted students to have another opportunity to invite community members or their parents in to shop for all their great products,” Lugo said.

Sophomore Olivia Brown said she enjoyed having a real shop and seeing people show up to buy products she had put a lot of effort into.

“I was looking forward to experiencing my first time having a shop and getting to sell our product. I think it went really well, honestly better than I thought it would. We made a good amount of sales and had a decent amount of people show up,” Brown said.

According to Lugo, both her and the students reached out to the community to ensure that people would attend the event.

“I sent out press releases to all our local media contacts, made sure it was put in the 6425 News. Then the kids had to make sure that they sent out invitations too,” Lugo said. “They each had to send out five personal email invitations to the pop-up shop.”

Lugo said getting the businesses started, selling products and making a profit was a lot harder for students than they thought, but it taught them how to work through challenges.

“Everyone goes in thinking that running a business is easy, but there’s a lot of challenges that come up and they have to learn how to anticipate challenges and overcome those challenges,” Lugo said. “People don’t just show up to shop somewhere, you have to let them know and use promotion.”

Brown said throughout the whole process of making her product, she learned how to solve problems and what it takes to make a successful business.

“Our product, socks, were a little challenging to figure out how we wanted to make them until Ms. Lugo presented the idea of heat press and transfer paper and we’ve been doing that for all of our socks,” Brown said. “I learned how to use the heat press, everything involved with manufacturing and how to make a good pitch to sell our socks.”

According to Overall, her business, Jewelry Junkies, didn’t sell a lot Saturday, but she learned that the most important part of having a business is what you put into it. 

“It went alright, we didn’t have many sales but still had fun. I learned that you do not have to have sales to have fun. I love making jewelry, it’s very calming and I have learned a lot about handling small objects,” Overall said.

According to Brown, it was exciting to see people supporting all the businesses and making money, but next time it would be more beneficial to come more prepared.

“We sold a lot of our product and made a decent amount of money and people were genuinely excited to use our socks,” Brown said. “I think we need to have more product to sell because we had a limited selection which wasn’t good.”

According to Lugo, in the future she would want to plan the pop-up shop strategically so they have a higher turnout of customers.

“If we do it again, I think we would look at the school calendar a little bit more and make sure we are coordinating with what events are going on in the school,” Lugo said. “It would help anticipate some of the crowds that come in and be able to sell to those people as well.”