Team Blog

Week 23 (27 Feb - 5 Mar)

Given that our Business Showcase is upcoming next Wednesday (9th March), this will be our final team blog post! Our team has definitely come a long way from October 2021, when we had just formulated our business plan. As a reference, here is the initial timeline of our business plan:

Nov 2021

Ascertain Market Demand

Primary Research (survey with parents, speaking to KOLs)

Registration as LLP

Jan 2022

Assembling of playboxes for sales

Develop website as primary sales channel

Execute marketing strategies to build outreach and brand credibility

March 2022

Use feedback collated to refine products and growth strategies

Assess possibilities for future expansion

Dec 2021

Establish partnerships with experts in early childhood education field

Develop instructional materials for playboxes

Source for playbox resources and place orders

Feb 2022

Monitor sales and financial growth

Evaluate what can be improved (speak to customers) for future growth

Overall, we have implemented our initial business plan quite thoroughly. Along the way, we did face some challenges which caused some delays, but we have managed to push through with most of our initial plan. Some minor changes were:

Implementing a pilot box first for ages 1-2 years, instead of a whole product line.
Selling our boxes through social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, instead of a website.
Sourcing for our toys from Shopee instead of Alibaba or toy warehouses in Singapore, as we did not have the luxury of bulk ordering and had to factor in delayed shipment times. However, we managed to do this at a lower cost per box.

As for our marketing efforts, we have managed to collaborate with 2 micro-influencers, and conducted 2 rounds of media buy with A/B testing.

Some insights from our digital marketing campaign include:

Video posts achieved higher reach than stories
Most people only view 2-3 seconds of videos
Picture posts with shorter captions are more effective
Ads on Facebook received more engagement than on Instagram
Reaching out to alternative target audiences increases our market size drastically

As a summary of our achievements, we have:

Managed to develop our Polaris box for ages 1-2 years with the consultation of experts from the early childhood education field. Includes an instructional booklet with QR codes that lead to instructional videos.
Sold 2 of our Polaris boxes in the last month (Feb), gave away 2 more boxes to micro-influencers that we managed to reach out to.
Prepared marketing material leading up to product launch (Jan), conducted a marketing campaign and A/B testing in the last month (Feb).
Generally, our feedback from both customers and micro-influencers have been quite positive. The children are very entertained by the toys, and the young parents agree that our boxes have saved them much time, providing them with convenience. As a follow-up, our team will continue to engage our customers to find out if we can lower the price point, revamp the box further, or try to collect better data in terms of how the toys can truly benefit the children in developing their milestones. Our team is also planning to explore different sales channels in the near future.
We have also attached the P/L statement below. Since the information is confidential, we will only be sharing it upon request.

P/L Dec'21 to Feb'22.pdf

It has been great working with everyone, and glad to see that Little Dipper has grown a lot since October 2021! Thank you everyone for your hard work! :)

Signing off,

Little Dipper

Week 22 (20 Feb - 27 Feb)

Being the week before recess week, many of the team members were busy with revision for CAs, and internship duties. Furthermore, with one member testing positive for COVID, our team was unable to deliver more in terms of content or strategic foresight. However, thanks to the plan that we had done up several weeks prior, we were still able to push out some content.

This week, we followed up with the two students who were interested in joining LD as interns. Nandika and Kerrianne had done up a list of questions to get to know the students more. After, Nandika and Kerrianne had a Zoom session with the students to get to know their motivations and to align both the team's and the students' expectations. Following this session, their response was made available to the rest of the team wherein we collectively agreed to onboard them as interns. In the next week, we will be holding a Zoom session for everyone to get to know one another, as well as to scope out the job functions that the interns will be helping to support.

We had also pushed out our first testimonial post. After touching base with the influencers that we had gifted the playbox to, we felt that for our first testimonial, it would be best to highlight Zee's experience, seeing as we also had multiple shots of her and her baby enjoying the products. Despite getting in contact with her 2+ weeks ago to get her testimony, she was unable to reply ASAP due to other commitments. Thankfully, she followed up and had shared an excerpt that she felt was fitting to describe her experience with the playbox. Following this, we had managed to quickly push out the testimonial post since we had already done anticipatory work to select images that would accompany the testimonial.

Thankfully, we're all managing our commitments and are now gearing up in anticipation of the Business Showcase 🥰

Week 21 (13 Feb - 19 Feb)

We started the week off with some interesting news. Two NTU students, interested in joining MiE, reached out to us. They wanted to intern with Little Dipper to get a feel of startup culture before joining MiE. This prompted us to have a team meeting to decided if we wanted to bring them aboard as interns and a deeper discussion on what each member wants to do after the end of MiE was also had.

Seeing as all 5 members of Little Dipper are getting really busy with CAs and internships, we decided that it would be better if we had some help. We wanted to have a zoom meeting with them to better understand what they want out of an internship with us and to see what they can bring to the table - can they do videography/photography, use video/photo editing programs and know how to use social media platforms. We will not be involving them in the management of Little Dipper and as of now, they cannot join Little Dipper as a shareholder. We've also made it clear should they join us, it would be an unpaid internship.

We had a discussion on the responsibilities of the shareholders and management, and decided that

- Shareholder: puts in money, gets dividends
- Management: also involved in activities and making decisions, gets payed a salary

After that we had a discussion on how involved we see ourselves being in Little Dipper after MiE. Sadly, one of our shareholders will have to leave us as at the end of the mod. The remaining 4 shareholders will have to buy out her share. When that happens, the remaining 4 shareholders will have a chance to change the equity they currently hold in little Dipper. As of now, the remaining members have decided to stay on as shareholders and managers, but in the future, there is strong sentiment to hire someone else for the management of Little Dipper while we stay on as shareholders.

Even though we'd only gotten 1 of the numerous micro-influencers we contacted to partner with us, we hadn't given up and had been following, building a rapport and reaching out to more influencers. Lovelledebra and Harleyharper reached out to us, interested in partnering up with us.

Lovelledebra was splendid to work with, and she got back to us quickly with her interests and what content we required her to post. We wanted some cross-post opportunities and photos and videos to highlight and use on Little Dipper's posts. Within a week of reaching out to us, she has already posted her first Instagram reel of her toddler opening the Polaris box.

Unfortunately, while Harleyharper has expressed keen interest in reviewing our box, on top of the free package, we would need to pay her a fee for her services as she has to be fair to the other brands that have paid for her services. Thus, we had to let go of this potential partnership.

We also had a valentines post that we used to go into greater detail of 2 activities - Castle dream and Treasure hunt - included in the Polaris box

Week 20 (6 Feb - 12 Feb)

It was a nerve wrecking week. We started the week with a mini crisis! The website which we generated our QR codes from has changed its policy, and would require us to pay a hefty sum of €12.50 per month, which would be €150 a year, to continue using the QR codes. If we chose not to pay, the QR codes that we are currently using on all our 20 printed booklets would expire and cease to work. After some discussion, looking for alternative QR generation sources and coming up with ideas for solutions, our options are as follows:

Pay the expensive fees, but incur large costs
Get new QR codes from another source and reprint our booklets
Get new QR codes from another source and paste them over our old QRs in the booklets

Option 3 would be the most economical, although we would have to slightly compromise the aesthetic feel of the booklet, and would have to send the new QR codes to 2 customers who already received our boxes. My team went along with the idea to print it on sticker paper, to retain as much of the current aesthetic look and professionalism of the booklet. As our current sticker vendor does not print stickers with such small size (1cm length, to be suitable for our QR codes), we would print it ourselves.

However, we were met with another difficulty - the school’s printing services are not available anymore! We would have to go to printing services outside of school. Time is extremely tight as we have to deliver our box to another customer by the end of the week.

With much collaboration between team members, our team managed to print the stickers, and pass each other the new QR codes to paste on the booklets.

Crisis averted :)

Yet, despite the “emergency”, my team went on punctually with our marketing schedule, putting up the first post of our new series - introducing the activities in the box 2 by 2. In an attempt to get potential customers to know more about our box content, my team has decided to reveal the activities in the box through our social media, while keeping the exact play a secret.

However, we were faced with yet another problem. Due to unexpected circumstances, Zee Yun was tied up with other matters and was unable to get back to us with her testimonial for our testimonial post on Thursday. We decided to postpone the testimonial posts to give her more time to prepare.

At the end of the week, we came together for a team meeting to analyse our media buy insights, review marketing strategies and posts for the upcoming week.

Our IG post performed better than our IG story in terms of higher reach, but both had little engagement. This may be because our campaign objective is video views. There were many plays of our videos, but out of the 6000+ plays only a small margin (200+) of viewers watched our video till the end. This may be due to most people skipping our ads.

We decided to try boosting static posts (pictures), to see if this will capture the attention of viewers better, instead of videos, which are longer. We would boost one of our older posts which describes the USP of our playboxes, and a new post that would briefly introduce all the content of our playbox to allow people to know us more. The campaign objective would be engagement. We would also try a new audience - baby shower - to target people who are finding a gift for babies, instead of just parents.

What an eventful week!

Photos below: New sponsored posts!

Week 19 (30 Jan - 5 Feb)

This week, our team managed to launch our sponsored posts on Friday. We opted to have an IG Story, as well as a sponsored post. The sponsored post on Facebook and Instagram was a 45 second video of Polaris, introducing Little Dipper, as well as the content within Polaris. The IG story was a 15 second version of that video, as we wanted to capture a larger audience. We hope to gain valuable insights and re-evaluate our strategy next week.

It is exciting that our team is finally pushing our products out. In view of that, Jiaqi created an order placement form for customers, and Kerrianne finished up the last bit of editing the marketing videos. Grace put up the sponsored post based on the plan we discussed on as a team, Danesha delivered our first playbox to our micro-influencer Jill (she is a radio DJ), and Nandika also helped to vet through the marketing videos. With the whole team's input, we managed to launch our marketing plans successfully. The team also drafted email templates that can be sent out easily, facilitating the purchase order process.

Feel free to take a look at our marketing video! The link is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CZk0BrFlnxW/

Photo: Launching our ads!

Week 18 (23 Jan - 29 Jan)

This week, our team had a productive consultation with Mr Roderick and Ms Lili. From the consultation, our team gained clearer insights about how to strengthen our current plans, and how to best move forward, especially in the marketing aspect. One key takeaway we had was the glaring need to emphasise on our unique selling proposition in order to generate stronger demand for our product. This was an aspect our team was lacking in, as we faced issues and had doubts about how to most appropriately add credibility to our brand by highlighting the involvement of the experts who have helped us in our product development. Using the guidance we've received from the consultation, our team will proceed with caution, paying special attention to our branding by using effective keywords and key adjectives in our posts. Other insights that we've gained include possibilities for expansion of our brand to not only first-time parents/parents-to-be, but also for gifting purposes. We felt that this was a very apt suggestion brought forward by both instructors as it helps us in widening our target audience pool to a wider and more ideal size to increase reach.

In other news, one good milestone our team hit this week was the launch of our sales. We have officially released our order placement link, accessible from our Instagram and Facebook accounts. In view of the fact that we need a bit more time to refine our marketing plans and work on our outreach efforts to our micro-influencers, our team collectively agreed that it was still on task that we release the order forms first, so as to not further deviate from our planned timeline. For inventory, our team has also placed orders for our next 10 boxes (as mentioned in Week 17's post), we managed to get our hands on The Very Hungry Caterpillar books, which were out of stock previously. We have been notified that the Paint Pads were out of stock so we will be keeping a look out for alternative options. As planned, we will still be looking into overseas suppliers to get our inventory from. Our team placed this second batch of orders as contingency plan in the event that we get good sales from the first few weeks of launch. Hence, we are not too pressed with this issue for now as our main focus will be on marketing.

Heeding the advice from both instructors, our team has refined our parameters for our A/B testing, which we will begin next week. We are glad we got to run our plans by the instructors, as they gave us very helpful guidance on which parameters we should keep, modify, or do away with to achieve a more ideal reach. Other suggestions that really helped were the key adjectives we should use for our posts and comments on our current posts - which points needed to be strengthened (i.e. emphasis on USP), and other pointers including post layout (i.e. reduce wordiness). Moving ahead, our team will be experimenting on promoting both still posts and video versions as part of our testing plans, keeping in mind that we will have to establish and highlight Little Dipper's value proposition before we promote our sales launch and promotional discounts posts.

For the next week, we will focus on marketing as planned, make minor changes to our social media channels (in terms of aesthetics/layout) and continue engagement with the micro-influencers we made contact with. We will be ready to fulfil any orders and hope that our marketing efforts will pay off over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for further updates next week!

Week 17 (16 Jan - 22 Jan)

Unfortunately, this week didn't start off on the best foot. We were supposed to post our 2nd Instagram post - introducing Little Dipper - on 16 Jan. Even though we'd already gotten the captions and photo ready, the post didn't go up; due to us getting busier and some miscommunication. We managed to get the post up in 17 Jan and after some discussion, we decided to have bi-weekly Zoom check-ins to prevent miscommunication, and to ensure we keep to the planned timeline as much as possible.

We made the final edits to our instructional booklet. We sent the booklet over to our experts to vet and most of them gave the go-ahead, with a few minor changes. Through the many consultations we had with various experts and Mr Roderick, our business plan and vision for the play box has come a long way. Since Ms Belinda wanted to be credited only as a consultant, and we could not put down her position in NIEC, we decided to forgo crediting anyone on our booklet for now. Instead, we included a line informing customers that information was adapted from ECDA's syllabus. Thanks to Kerrianne's fast editing skills, we managed to have the photos for the booklet and a rough draft of the videos ready this week. The finalised instructional videos and marketing video should be finished early next week, and we'll be able to send the finalised booklets for printing.

We also put out our 3rd post this week. We used that opportunity to describe some of the resources in the playbox, so as to get people interested, and to inform them that we will be launching soon. We also had a discussion on how much to reveal about our box, as we had to showcase the products inside to incentivise customers to purchase it. However, we also decided not to reveal all the contents within the box, which helps to maintain a feeling of mystery and intrigue.

At the start of the week, we messaged the influencers we had vetted through in the previous week. It was fortunate that we had the foresight to seek out a considerable number of influencers, as the majority left us on read. A few of the influencers such as @c0rde, @familystaysg and @_mrschia_ messaged us to ask us more on the playbox, but eventually stopped responding. Luckily for us, @killjilllll was very willing to try out the box. We will be delivering the box to her house. We decided to give her the creative freedom on what captions and photos to use, as we wanted her post to seem as genuine as possible. However, we will be giving some information for her to include in her caption, such as the date for the start of sales and promotion.

Since we only started out with 10 playboxes - of which, around 3 will be handed out in exchange for reviews and marketing - we decided to reorder items for another 10 boxes. Unfortunately, we faced a few issues. The Very Hungry Caterpillar books were out of stock, and would only be replenished in mid-February. As for the paint pads, the seven-coloured size Ms were out of stock as well. Since the shops are closed due to Chinese New Year and would only resume on 8 Feb, this also led to future delays. As for the pom poms, we received feedback that some of the assorted sizes were too small, so we looked into buying specific sizes and found a much cheaper online shop, allowing us to save as much as $20 on that item.

We are also searching up Alibaba listings for the relevant products, which can possibly help us to find cheaper alternatives to bring the cost per box down.

Finally, with Grace leading the way, we discussed the parameters we should use and experiment with for the targeted ads. We decided to keep the age range broad from 24 - 39 years old.

Week 16 (9 Jan - 15 Jan)

This past week, we got a lot done as a team :))

First, we had posted our first IG post on 10th Jan. Our first post was a simple one of our logo, with the main purpose of gathering followers and acting as a soft launch into our marketing campaign. Following our first post, each of the team members took to our personal IG pages to spread the word and generate buzz for Little Dipper. Due to this, we successfully managed to accumulate both followers and likes. However, one issue that we encountered, and had predicted, was that between the five members, our personal IG following did not constitute Little Dipper's target audience (parents, especially first-time parents). Therefore, we began exploring possibilities of how to better reach out to our target audience with the subsequent posts. One obvious solution that we arrived at was targeted ads. We decided to allocate marketing budget of $20/week for targeted ads and boosting of posts from the last week of Jan till the end of Feb.

Photos: The birth of our IG page with our first post, and the behind-the-scenes of deliberating over the caption for the post

Most importantly, over this week, we had our product and video shoot :))) YAY!

Kerrianne, Grace and Nandika met at 7:15 am on the 15th to prep for the shoot. This prep included listing all the shots that we needed to get from the shoot, the order of tackling the to-do list, and preparing the box so that we could set a good first impression on Zee Yun (the mother of the baby).

From 8:30 am - 11:00 am, the shoot with the baby and Zee Yun took place. Thankfully, Zee Yun agreed to feature both her face and her baby's. While we initially discussed as a team to omit the face as much as possible, we very quickly realised that the only way to fully capture the enthusiasm of the baby when playing with the product was to capture the baby's facial expressions. Further, since the videos taken were going to be edited into instructional videos that supplement the box, we found that featuring the face of both the parent and the baby best showed the parental interaction that we wished for the Polaris box to achieve.

Photos: Shoot team on the way to Zee Yun's house with our materials, shoot team in-action at Zee Yun's house

Following the shoot with the baby, the three team members continued with the product shoot at Kerrianne's house - mainly to get flatlays and material for IG.

At Kerrianne's house, Jiaqi and Dan joined in virtually via Zoom for a quick meeting and check-in. During this meeting, we discussed our marketing budget and plan; following which, Grace was tasked to come up with a detailed plan on how to allocate our budget in the subsequent weeks.

Also, we went through the micro-influencers that Jiaqi and Dan had found, and that we could potentially contact for marketing purposes. Further, we discussed and finalised the selling price of our Polaris box after much deliberation.

Moreover, in this meeting, Nandika brought up some pointers that her friend with design experience had given with regards to our information booklet mockup. As a team, we went over the pointers and had decided to adjust some of the details and the wordings. Since Kerrianne had the photos from the shoot and was to edit them, she would also continue on to edit the booklet's design details, while Nandika was to further revise the prose within the booklet in collaboration with the experts. Both Nandika and Kerrianne would work together to send our information booklets for printing by the end of the next week.

Altogether, we also decided to begin the search for cheaper alternatives for our products from Alibaba and Taobao to ease and expedite our ordering process for the next round of boxes. Everyone was tasked to contribute.

Photos: Behind the scenes for the flatlay shots, group photo after the meeting

In the coming week, we would be sending our information booklets for printing, and editing both our stills and videos to get ready for sales. We will also upload 2 posts to start contacting micro-influencers about collaboration for marketing purposes.

This week was packed, but we're all very excited to finally get started on the marketing and the sales!
Special thanks to everyone on the team for doing their part and being highly collaborative :))

Week 15 (2 Jan - 8 Jan)

We are one step closer to completing our playboxes this week as we received more products that had yet to be delivered. The stacking cups - the final item in our playbox - have finally arrived!

Our new logo, which we had sent for printing last week, is also completed and collected. We would be pasting them onto the playboxes soon to finish the look.

In addition, we have finished designing and writing the content for the instruction booklet, leaving out designated spaces for the videos' QR codes and pictures depicting the activities - all of which has to be taken during the product video shoot with an infant. All other team members gave inputs and feedback for the initial draft done up by Kerrianne and Nandika, and through team effort, we came up with our improved finalised draft for the booklet. An issue to note was that we were deciding between introducing 2 products on 1 page versus 3 products on 1 page. The former will be neater and less cluttered, while the latter will reduce the number of pages required and hence printing costs. After much discussion, we took a vote and chose to prioritise aesthetics over costs, as the costs difference were not too great. Besides, it is more important to think of what our customers would like. We believe that with a less cluttered feel, our booklet will be more elegant and easier to understand.

We have sent the finalised draft to our expert who specialises in writing educational instructions for parents, but she has yet to get back to us. Thus, we also sent our draft to 2 more experts to look through, and are also awaiting their feedback eagerly.

Our team also finalised the marketing plan, which was drafted up by Grace. We looked through the marketing plan, which consists of the content and instructions for the IG/FB posts, plans for our digital marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram, as well as plans to engage with (micro)influencers. We hope that we would be able to get some insights from our marketing campaign, and get more concrete information on how to carry out our marketing activities more effectively.

Photo: The cover page of our instruction booklet for parents, part of the marketing plan.

Despite our progress, we hit a roadblock. Our current contact for the video shoot with an infant was not keen to do the video shoot anymore. This caused a delay in our schedule, as we had hoped to complete the video shoots with the baby by this week or early next week. This is so that we can produce our instructional videos and complete the playbox, as well as start marketing and sales. However, with this delay, our entire plan may be pushed back, in turn resulting in us having an extremely tight marketing and sales schedule. Yet, there are not many alternative options - finding willing parents with babies under 2 years is not an easy feat.

We had a backup plan - contact Ms Shai to take up her offer. She had previously suggested that she can contact someone she knows to see if they are willing to let us do our video shoot with their child. In addition, our group decided to contact any other parents we know with babies under 2 years old to see if they are willing to do the video shoot with us. The situation was very urgent as we did not want to delay our schedule further.

Just as we were all losing hope, Nandika got a reply from her mother's colleague on Saturday! She seemed very eager to do the video shoot with us. Nandika immediately explained to her about our video shoot, and liaised with her for other details, such as location and timing.

In the end, we got permission from her to do the video shoot with us! We are all very excited after a long exhausting week of futilely contacting and waiting for replies. We are to conduct the video shoot at her house next Saturday, 15 Jan, in the morning. We would also bring over our playbox and equipment. Moreover, we also obtained permission to get her testimonial after she used the playboxes, to be published in our 4th IG/FB post as per the marketing plan. To take precautions against the Covid-19 situation, one of her requests was that only 3 out of 5 of us would go to her house to do the video shoot. We discussed and concluded that it would be manageable for 3 of us. Nandika, Kerrianne and Grace would be going. This is because Nandika is the point of contact and holding on to the playboxes, Kerrianne is in-charge of the videography, and Grace, as the marketing in-charge, will ensure that we record all the materials we want. We also plan to bring the family a gift as a form of appreciation.

All in all, after our plans had failed us, we were all glad and relieved that we did not give up and ultimately found somebody who is also very keen on the idea. :) We look forward to working with her next Saturday!

Photo: Getting permission from an enthusiastic parent to do the video shoot with their child!

We also held a group meeting on Saturday night to settle the shooting details and the printing of the instruction booklets. We further confirmed what we would need to bring, and the various types of videos and photos we would have to take. As the timing for the video shoot with the baby is tight (~2h), Kerrianne would help us come up with a shot list to plan what we have to shoot with the baby, and the shots we can take in our own time. We then moved on to execute our marketing plan, discussing the content of our first post. Grace would edit the photo to be posted and come up with the caption, while Nandika will vet the caption and help to come up with a list of hashtags (optimised with Google Keyword Planner) to include in the comments. Grace would then post on both IG and FB on 6pm on Monday, the busiest time of the social media platform, in hopes of getting more impressions. All of us would then publicise the first post in our own IG accounts, and also use the Little Dipper account to follow others. Meanwhile, Jia Qi and Danesha would be researching for (micro)influencers to connect with. In the near future, we would also have to expand our Digital Marketing Campaign plan in more detail as well, so that we can split the work to be done, and know what analysis to expect.

Week 14 (26 Dec - 1 Jan)

Our team met up physically this week to pack and prepare our first few product units. Packing the units took more effort than we had anticipated, since it involved many steps. For example, we had to weigh the kinetic sand and the potato starch for the oobleck mixture. Fortunately, this was much easier as we had planned beforehand to buy the relevant plastic packaging, making sure that it was secure enough. Moreover, the boxes looked presentable. The boxes are themed according to "The Hungry Caterpillar", and items included are:

Hungry Caterpillar Books
Kinetic Sand of Different Colours
Oobleck Mixture
Pom-poms for Frozen Pom-pom Exploration
Ink Pads / Finger Paint
Bristle Blocks
Stacking Cups

We have carefully curated these items after taking all the advice from our experts into consideration. Most of our products are very colourful and bright, so as to ensure that the infants can recognise different colours, especially primary colours. This was also the advice given by Ms Belinda, our expert from NIEC. Next, we also ensured that these items help our infants to achieve the different milestones, such as fine motor skills, creativity, recognition, and communication. We also included items that are simple and interactive, as suggested by Ms Shai and Fedore (Shuqi).

The stacking cups have yet to arrive, but we will include them soon. To recreate the visual of the night sky, we ordered black boxes and sprinkled metallic paint over. We will also be sticking our logo stickers over when they arrive.

As we understand that the items will not be meaningful without parental interaction and supervision, we have also been diligently working on the information booklet that condenses all the activities that parents can participate in with their children. We will be having product and video shoots, and QR codes will be placed within the information booklets for parents to learn how to use the toys quickly. By the end of this week, we will come up with a mock-up of the information booklets and send them to our experts again.

On Tuesday, we also had an online meeting to refine our marketing plans and product shoots. We aim to come up with the specific marketing actionables for the next 2 months by next week.

Our blog also has a new design now, according to our new logo :) We also changed the designs of our Facebook and Instagram pages, as we prepare for an official launch soon.

Our team is very grateful for all the help that we have had from our experts. Besides, making our boxes themed according to books gives us a lot of space to manoeuvre for future boxes, in terms of R&D. The advice from our experts that we have taken into account also helps us ensure that the boxes are truly helpful for infant development, and we hope that we will receive equally positive feedback once we begin sales.

While formulating and curating the items for our boxes, we definitely had some worries while trying to keep the costs reasonable. Hence, we chose what we felt were the most crucial items. However, since infants are expected to get bored of their toys quickly, developing new boxes in the future will actually be much easier, as we have many more items, age groups, and themes to target. The information booklets and guarantees also differentiates our products from what is currently in the Singaporean market. In theory, this makes our business idea potentially sustainable. Practically speaking, we hope that we can make this happen as well, after some testing :P

Nonetheless, the progress that our team has made thus far is very encouraging, and we are excited for what is to come :)

Week 13 (19 Dec - 25 Dec)

This week, our team worked on the miscellaneous to-do items.

In preparation for our product shoot, we have made progress in building the plot-lines and storyboarding for our videos. We have also successfully contacted the people we plan to cast for our product shoot. The date and time of the shoot will be finalised in the days to come.

Photo 1: Product Shoot plot draft

We've gathered most of the materials we need for our box, including the main toys and our product box itself. It is quite a relief that most of our products arrived on time, which will make it easier for our team to proceed with our packing during our next meeting.

Photo 2: Huge unfolded box - slightly unexpected, was not the easiest feat to transport it home

Upon reviewing the aesthetics of our brand logo, we have decided to make some changes to our logo such that it fits more comfortably with our box design. These changes will be applied accordingly to our information booklet which is currently in the making.

Photo 3: New Brand Logo

Our team has some more happening activities to look forward to in the next few weeks, one of which includes packing our products, which we shall write about in the next week.

Stay tuned for our next blog entry, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays all :)

Week 12 (12 Dec - 18 Dec)

Following the meetings with our various industry experts last week, we have taken the first step to place orders for several items that would be packaged into our playboxes.

Photo: Shopee screenshot of our purchase of some of the materials to go inside the box!

While waiting for the items to be delivered, we had a physical meet-up on 17th December 2021. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, Jia Qi was unable to join the rest of the team. Nonetheless, the rest of us met up at Plaza Singapura, but updated and consulted with Jia Qi via Zoom on the decisions that we were making.

The purpose of this meeting was to purchase several other materials that we would need in the handling of the boxes (i.e. plastic containers for repackaging, decorative paint, etc).

Photo: The team at Daiso contemplating over container decisions :)

We headed into Daiso to purchase cheaper alternatives of plastic containers and decorative materials. Since the plastic containers were solely to repackage materials like kinetic sand, we had multiple options. However, given that we wanted to minimise the cost per box, we had to make several difficult decisions in compromising aesthetics and appearance for the cost per container (more containers bundled together for $2, instead of $2/container).

Photo: Some of the items that we were considering purchasing from Daiso for our playboxes.

Also, we had discussed about the filming process of our instructional videos. As discussed with our industry experts, we settled on filming videos showing parents how best to play with the materials in the box (for each item), and embedding a QR code into the information guide that will be included in each box. During this meeting, we had divided up tasks for storyboarding each of the video shoots so as to make our filming process as smooth as possible.

Additionally, we had sourced for parents and babies who would be willing to be our 'models' in the filming of our instructional videos. Furthermore, we had also finalised our packaging materials supplier and were placing the orders in for our initial volume of 10 boxes. We also began sourcing for printing services for our stickers and information guides that would conclude the overall experience of our playboxes.

Week 11 (5 Dec - 11 Dec)

For Week 11, we had several consultations with our experts, Shuqi, Belinda and Shai.

On 7/12/2021, we were supposed to have a meeting with both Shuqi and Belinda, but unfortunately, Belinda couldn't make it, and we had to reschedule her consultation to a later date. Firstly, we started the meeting off with Shuqi vetting the milestones we decided to focus on, along with our chosen products. She gave us her approval and stated that the milestones are accurate to their age group. She advised us to select DIY activities encouraging parent-child bonding and to find creative ways to use the products included in our boxes - for example, silicone stacking cups can be used for stacking, water play during shower time and sand play with the kinetic sand. The DIY activities should not be hazardous to 1-2-year-olds and be made with non-toxic, child-friendly material should the toddler bite it. Instead of including Play-doh in our box, we should make it a DIY activity for them to make edible playdoh with flour and water. Her advice for the books was to find books with big pictures, as toddlers between 1-2 still can't read and might get bored if it included too many words. A great piece of advice Shuqi gave us was to make our boxes thematic, such that the DIY activities are related to the book provided in the box.

On 9/12/2021, we had a consultation with Shai. Initially, we wanted the 1-2-year-old playboxes to last for one year. However, after informing Shai of our change to a thematic box focusing on a book, she told us that providing one book every 6-12 months is a bit of a stretch and that instead, we should provide one thematic book box per month with a different book each month. She also had concerns about costs as good hardcover children's books can be expensive, and told us to get them from distributors such as Excess Books for a lower price. She also reminded us again to not include small items in our packages, such as buttons and googly eyes, as well as to have in writing that parents have to supervise their toddlers when doing any of the activities. For choosing the right book to include, she recommended that we look at NLB's top books list for that age group, and look at books with Scholastic Awards. She also informed us that the books should have many pictures and a simple repetitive structure that toddlers can anticipate, having simple vocabulary. She also introduced us to dialogic reading and informed us that it's an excellent skill to teach the parents through our box and videos. Finally, she told us to include 2-3 activities relating to the book per box and that we could also target teachers and playgroups with our activity sets in the future.

After the meeting with Shai, we had an internal meeting where we finalised the book and toys to include in the box. The finalised item list was: The Hungry Caterpillar, Silicon Stacking Cups, Bristle Blocks, Finger Paint, Pompoms and Kinetic Sand. We also looked into possible packaging we wanted to use.

Though Shai had recommended that we include more than one book, our team believed that it would be better to have a more focused approach for our initial product units. We did not want to overcommit and increase the unit cost price drastically, and we thought that it would be good to test one book for the initial units first. Additionally, we managed to find an affordable distributor for The Hungry Caterpillar on Shopee. Initially, Shuqi had recommended "Press Here" as the book, but we felt that The Hungry Caterpillar would be more interactive in terms of activities that we could formulate in relation to it.

On 10/12/2021 was our rescheduled meeting with Ms Belinda. After we showed her our milestones, she informed us that they were a good choice to focus on, but she recommended that we change the phrasing such that we use words familiar to the parents. When we showed her our chosen products, she suggested that we choose products with primary colours, and to get a written guarantee or certificate that the products we bought are made of non-toxic and child-friendly material. This is mainly because some Chinese companies still use paint and colouring with lead in them. A DIY activity she suggested was oobleck play with the parents' help. She also wanted us to include, if possible, child-proof scissors for cutting out caterpillars on paper. This was because many playgroup and kindergarten kids apparently do not know how to use scissors, and are too scared to use them nowadays.

However, we have decided against including this in our box as we want to keep our prices as low as possible. We were also lucky enough for Ms Belinda to allow us to use her name and titles for the endorsement of our products. She also recommended that another avenue we can look at for our future boxes is parent education. Our booklet could give instructions teaching the parents how to properly communicate with their toddlers, as well as how to teach and engage their toddlers at home through the toys and activities we have included, instead of just focusing on the milestones. As Belinda is an expert in Parent Education, we are thinking of getting her help and opinion on the booklets when we are done with them.

Week 10 (28 Nov - 4 Dec)

Immediately after our final examinations ended, we went to recce 4 toy warehouses in Singapore to see if they could potentially be our supplier for our products.

Toy Tag

We found that Toy Tag had credible toys of high quality that could satisfy our key milestones that we were trying to hit for each of the age groups. However, as they could be considered to be of premium quality, they are quite expensive. If we were to purchase in bulk of about 30-50 units at one go, they would most probably be able to handle the quantity and pass us the products immediately. However, if they had ran out of stock, there would be a lag time of 3-5 months as they have to get the products from their supplier overseas. There would also be discount depending how many units we are purchasing.

Tai Sing

Tai Sing, on the other hand, was a disappointment. The warehouse was extremely small and had very limited variety of toys for us to choose from. Furthermore, the toys are not of high quality. Upon asking the store owner about delivery time and MOQs, she could provide very little details. In the end, we decided to rule out this warehouse as we had better options from the others.

Sintat Toys

This warehouse had a decent variety of toys, although with more toys for ages 1-2 than the younger age groups. They also had a good selection of educational toys, such as puzzles for matching and spelling words. They would be able to provide us stock for 30-50 units at once as they have more than enough units on hand. In the situation that they ran out of stock, there will be a lag time of 2-3 months, which is pretty long, but shorter than Toy Tag. They are also working with a poly group who are reselling toddler products, and are thus familiar with working with students. We would be able to come down to collect our products after placing orders. Similarly, discount will be given when we buy in bulk.

T for Toys

T for Toys had an even wider selection of high quality toys. Some were also not commonly seen, but serve similar purposes in achieving key milestones and encourage development for the infant. Some examples include finger paint to build creativity and coordination, and finger puppets for parents to communicate with their infants. This would give our boxes an interesting twist as the toys would be more engaging for parents to utilise as well. They also sold many toys in big tubs or bundles, making it easy for us to split the individual pieces amongst our boxes, saving costs. This warehouse not only gave us an optimistic outlook, but also inspire us to consider more types of toys.

Overall, other than Tai Sing, we are able to consider toys from the three warehouses. After viewing all 4 warehouses, we sat down to decide what products would go into each of our 3 boxes (0-6 months, 7-12 months, 1-2 years). Most items would come from T for Toys, and a select few from Toy Tag. We also considered cheaper alternatives from Shopee.

We then planned out the schedule for the rest of December and the start of January, including purchasing our products before the coming week to catch the 12/12 sales, and our marketing plans.

Photo: A view of the warehouse, T for Toys (above); Group picture during our recce's lunch (below)

On Saturday, we had our group consult with Mr Roderick and Mr Adrian. Mr Adrian have experience with marketing, especially in the area of digital marketing, so Mr Roderick invited him over to give us a hand. We are pleasantly surprised and greatly appreciate all the help, advice and guidance from both instructors. We first briefly go through what we have done so far, and what we are trying to achieve next. They gave us tips such as focusing on getting people to be interested in our product and be willing to try it. It would be great if we can target parents with children of a specific age group, get them to want to know more about our product, so that we can get in touch with them and give them our product in exchange for their feedback and testimonial. As we are in our initial phase (for R&D and marketing) of our entrepreneurship venture, it would be good to gain traction and make the necessary changes before pushing out more units for sales. If possible, we can get influencers on board to help us increase outreach to more relevant audiences. We were also advised to narrow down our age range so that we can focus our energy to target a specific market in our campaigning efforts. We could do more research to get to know our target audience, the parents, as well as the other users, the infants, so that we can angle our products to suit and attract them more. Examples include safety aspects for parents, and colours and textures for infants. We may make a loss in the end, but we should be clear about our target - it may not be breaking even or making sales, but publicity and outreach, or getting to know the demand for our products.

After, our team had our own internal meeting to sort out more details. The first key milestone reached was settling our bank account, which will be a new personal account that belonged to our CFO, Jia Qi. We also managed to come to an agreement to focus on our playbox for ages 1-2, so that we can target a more specific audience during our marketing campaign. We aimed to put together 10 boxes in the initial batch for giveaway and sales. We then nailed down the exact products to include in the boxes, which we plan to present to our KOLs (experts) on our meeting on the coming Tuesday.

Note: After a correction of terminology by Mr Adrian, we decided to refer to the professionals in early childhood development field as "experts", and the influencers we would want to engage in our marketing strategy as "influencers". This is because KOL in the social media marketing industry refers to the highest level influencer.

Week 8 (14 Nov - 20 Nov)

This week, we had a Zoom call with our second KOL, Ms Shaireen. With her expertise in curriculum development, she was of great help to us. Some of the most notable insights are as follows:

Child development milestones should be viewed in a continuum, rather than a mere checklist;
Ms Shai suggested that we could make short Tiktok-like videos that could engage parents within a short time frame, especially since they are occupied with parenting;
Importance of quality of engagement between young parents and their children;
Household items could be used as alternatives to toys;
Kindergartens and childcare centres are a possible target market, since educators are already short-handed, and often DIY their own toys to engage children.

These are all worthy points that our team will take into consideration. After the KOL meeting, our team discussed further and planned a date to go down personally to the toy warehouses we have chosen.

Photo: Ideas shared by Ms Shai!

Week 7 (7 Nov - 13 Nov)

Our team has made some progress on our project this week, with the highlight of the week being our meeting with Ms Angela Anthony, the first of our few potential KOLs.

During the meeting, our team presented the documents of our current proposed inventory and plans for our project. Based on the materials presented, Ms Anthony gave us some valuable input and advice on our age group segmenting and which items to include in our boxes. Ms Anthony also recommended us some materials we could reference from (e.g. ECDA's Growing with Your Child Toolkit) and offered to help us to locate more potential KOLs for further advice.

After the meeting, our team took the time to expand on our developmental milestones, researching on the milestones in specific aspects (i.e. motor, sensory, communication, socio-emotional and cognitive). Our team convened again on Saturday night to consolidate our findings in preparation for the next few meetings with our KOLs.

Apart from our KOL meeting, our team has set up our Aspire account, which will definitely make it easier for our team to proceed with our purchases in the next few weeks.

Our team looks forward to making good progress in the next few weeks. We will be meeting with our second KOL, Ms Shai on Sunday night, which we will elaborate on in our next journal entry. Stay tuned.

Photo: Extract of Consolidated Developmental Milestones

Week 6 (31 Oct - 6 Nov)

Despite not having met this week due to school commitments, we each independently still went ahead with tasks that required action.

Firstly, to address the issue of lacking survey responses from experienced parents, we had decided to reach out to parent support groups on Telegram and Facebook. To do this, Kerrianne has created a business account, and we are currently in the works of improving the brand page before we use that account to push out the survey to the Facebook parent support groups. Groups that we are targeting include 'Imperfect Parents of Singapore', 'Pregnant.sg mums', '2022 SG Parents', amongst others. We teased out these groups amongst the plethora that are available as these groups not only have substantial following, but are also highly relevant since parents within these groups have young children (Little Dipper's target market).

Also, on the KOL front, we are highly delighted that we have managed to schedule a Zoom call with Ms Angela Anthony for next week. To prepare for this meeting, we have begun looking into the specifics of which milestones of baby development we wish to focus on, and possible products that aid in each developmental milestone. Moreover, we had gotten a response from another KOL from NIEC that we had reached out to via email. She had replied that while she did not have to bandwidth to help us out at the moment, she would be willing to schedule a zoom call between us and her other skilled colleagues to facilitate Little Dipper's product research process. We are currently in the midst of scheduling this Zoom call.

Lastly, as discussed per Week 4's post, the plan for securing local toy suppliers was supposed to be underway by this week. Our initial plans were to split off into two teams and recce at least some of the suppliers by this week. However, given that school commitments have overwhelmed most of the team, we have decided that it would be better to postpone the supplier meetings till after finals. This would mean that we will only be able to secure our suppliers in December. While that is congruent with our intended timeline, it is disappointing that we were not able to expedite the process so as to allow for some leeway.

Photo: Targeted Facebook groups to push our survey

Week 5 (24 Oct - 30 Oct)

Nandika managed to get in contact with a potential KOL, Ms Angela Anthony, the senior assistant director of ECDA. She has agreed to do a sit-down with us to look over our developmental milestones and tools. Unfortunately, as she is quite busy, our meeting with her has been pushed back by about 1-2 weeks. Through Grace's contacts, she managed to get in touch with another potential KOL, Ms Belinda from NIEC.

We had to make a final decision on which domain name to pursue. littledipper.com was already taken and would cost around $120 to purchase. Though having the littledipper domain name will allow us to be more consistent with our branding, we presume it would not help us with SEO, as the first few searches that pop up are information pages on the Little Dipper constellations. After 2 rounds of voting, we came to the decision to use the littledipperplaybox.com domain name instead, which would only cost us $3 to purchase.

We were also in the process of commissioning a website for Little Dipper from Grace's friend, who offered to build us a website for free. After some discussing and consulting Grace's friend, we came to the unanimous decision to use Shopify instead of building a website from scratch. This is because Shopify comes with the necessary payment features, is easier to manage and build, and has better cyber security. Since making a Shopify website is really easy, we should be able to make one ourselves.

We also had to finalise which platform we were going to use for Little Dipper's finances. Our picks were between WISE and Aspire. After realising that WISE acts like a holding account and is compatible with Aspire, which in turn is compatible with Shopify, we decided to create an account for both platforms.

We also had a look at our survey results. We were aiming for about a hundred responses but had only managed to get 25 - of which only 2 were from parents. We decided to post our questionnaire on specific Facebook and Telegram groups frequented by parents. Hopefully, this can help us to reach out to the right target audience. We had to sieve through quite a few groups, as some seemed sketchy, or their group rules prohibited advertising or marketing of any form from companies.

Photo:

Week 4 (17 Oct - 23 Oct 2021)

We met on 18 October (Monday) to discuss how we should progress forward with Little Dipper, after getting feedback from Mr Roderick. We agreed that we would conduct PESTEL analysis and Porters' Five Forces for selected countries, namely Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. They are in close proximity to Singapore, and would know of Singapore's highly regarded education system. We hope that through our analysis, we would understand more on their market, and through that, assess which countries would provide Little Dipper with the greatest potential to grow (in terms of outreach to potential customers and raising profit). To ensure efficiency in our analysis and discussion, we planned to research on these countries on our own before reconvening on our next meeting to decide on countries to target.

In the meeting, we also registered Little Dipper as a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) of Singapore. Little Dipper is officially an LLP now! We are extremely thrilled to have achieved this milestone together. We also took our very first team photo to commemorate this memorable moment.

Following that, we explored different options to open a bank account for Little Dipper. Our team was on the same page on opening a separate bank account instead of using one of our existing accounts. We believe that this is more professional and would enable us to track our financials more easily. After some research on Singapore banks, we still have yet to find one that we deem as suitable. We decided that our Chief Financial Officer, Jia Qi, will do more research on other types of accounts and present to us some options in the next meeting.

Finally, we edited the KOL email that our Chief Executive Officer, Nandika, has drafted. Our Chief Operating Officer, Kerrianne, and our Chief Marketing Officer, Grace, will send out these emails the next day and reply to any replies to our emails.

Photo: First team photo after registering Little Dipper as LLP

We reconvened on Saturday, the 23rd of October to discuss our findings and sort out the aforementioned details.

After looking through our PESTEL analysis and Porters' Five Forces, we were still a little stuck in deciding which countries' market to penetrate. This is because there was not a country that present bigger or more opportunities for Little Dipper to capitalise on, and thus none seem more penetrable than the others.

Moreover, we were thinking to choose 2-3 overseas countries in addition to Singapore in order to increase our outreach and profit, but are worried that our marketing approach would not be very targeted. On the other hand, if we were to focus our marketing on just 1 country, we may have too small a market.

Another point of consideration was whether we should target Singapore first, before expanding to overseas countries. This is because we are more familiar with Singaporean groups and can exploit personal connections to raise brand awareness and presence. It would be easier for us to get ourselves involved in other local channels, such as Facebook support group for mums, to promote our brand there.

In the end, we approached Mr Roderick for advice on these points. He suggested that we had to put our heads together and make an informed decision as our choice would greatly affect our use of investment. We would have to think of ways to reach out to our potential customers, consider who would be the ones that are likely to subscribe to our playboxes, and the costs it would take us to reach out to them.

After more discussion, my group decided that we would stick to our original plan of starting off our business in Singapore before expanding to overseas, as we believe we would have more advantages here in Singapore.

Financials wise, Jia Qi, introduced us to WISE, a fintech company that seem suitable for our entrepreneurial venture. Generally, we were all supportive of this. Yet, before taking a large step forward to open an account with this company, we would check if there are any alternatives or better solutions. (We would finalise this in the next meeting.)

Unfortunately, contacting our KOLs have not gone smoothly. None of our KOLs replied us to say that they would be eager to come onboard with Little Dipper. We decided that Grace would contact our only current KOL to ask if she could link us up with more professionals in the early childhood sector, and Nandika would also contact more potential KOLs through personal connections.

We also discussed about outsourcing the creation of our website. This would free time for us to conduct more in-depth marketing research and outreach in future. Kerriane and Grace would contact acquaintances who can act as potential website developers for Little Dipper.

Additionally, we created a spreadsheet to keep records of potential suppliers for each of our product items. We initially searched up online suppliers, but realised that on top of a long delivery time, many require a large minimum order quantity (MOQ), and their quality (and hence safety) of the products are not guaranteed. Thus, we looked into Singapore wholesale toy sellers. Despite a slightly higher price, we would be able to check the quality of the products and obtain the products more easily.

Finally, we created and developed our questionnaire for our market research together. The aim of this survey would be to give us a sense of the potential demand for our playboxes, as well as a suitable price we could set.

Photo: Little Dipper's Market Research Questionnaire

Week 3 (10 Oct - 16 Oct 2021)

We held a meeting on 11 October (Monday) to run through our parts of the business plan, and edit it to make it more cohesive. Everyone was very productive individually and had done up our parts. As we had already ironed out the details in the previous meeting, making the plan cohesive was not a huge obstacle.

After pointing out the remaining gaps and deciding on the design of our website, we decided to reconvene again on Thursday.

On Thursday, we finalised our business plan and the website, which we had already done up individually as well. We rehearsed the presentation on Friday, before our pitch on Saturday. It was insightful to receive feedback from the class and Mr Roderick, as well as hear the presentations of other teams. Our team is excited to continue refining our idea and finally execute it.

Photo: Feedback from our business presentation on 16 Oct.

Week 1 & 2 (26 Sept - 9 Oct 2021)

From 26 Sept to 29 Sept, we had daily ideation sessions, and proposed them to Mr Roderick. However, we finally decided on our idea of playbox resources on 2nd October, as we felt that it was the most feasible, given our limited resources. Moreover, this idea had potential for expansion into Southeast Asian markets.

In the second week, we did our research individually, and reconvened on 8th October for a group meeting. We went through our research pointers to ascertain the feasibility of our idea, and split the work within the business plan accordingly.

Nandika would be in charge of the product analysis, Danesha would be in charge of the market analysis, Grace would be in charge of the operational plan, Jia Qi would be in charge of the financial plan, and Kerrianne would be in charge of the development, milestones and exit plan.

We will then reconvene in the following week to prepare for our business presentation.

Photo: We made a logo!

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