Make Project 2014 Holly, Claire & Uma

OUR PROJECT For our project, we decided to make our own cosmetics. We planned to start a business selling the products we made. The products we originally planned to start out with were a lip gloss product, an eye shadow product and a moisturizer product.

EXPECTED LEARNING The knowledge we expected to gain from this project consisted of the key concepts to starting and promoting a business. We wanted to learn and hoped to experience this process by finishing some of our product and putting it out there for people to notice and possibly consider buying We also wanted to learn about some of the health benefits to using natural ingredients in our homemade cosmetics.

WHAT WE LEARNED We did a good amount of research on the main ingredients of our cosmetics. We gained reliable knowledge about the following ingredients used in the base of many different types of cosmetics; beeswax, vitamin E oil, and Aloe Vera. As a starter for our business, we decided to make a blog to tell the public a little about what was we were doing. We also made our own logo and a flyer to advertise our business if we were ever to mange to get it off the ground. We don’t have much experience with business interaction because we weren’t able to make anything more but our prototypes and test products. In the process of making our product, we learned how to easily and quickly make these things using very few ingredients. We learned enough about the production of these cosmetics to make knowledgeable changes to the recipes for these cosmetics to make the final product more successful.

CHALLENGES/SOLUTIONS The recipes we found online for the cosmetics didn’t come out exactly how we wanted them too at first. But we altered some of the recipes to improve the final product. An example of this would be, when we added vitamin E oil to the eye shadow to make it more compact. Rather than it be a loose powder, we transformed the cosmetic into something more like a liquid eye shadow. Another issue we ran into was the lip gloss. It wasn’t solidifying correctly, so we decided to use more beeswax than cocoa butter so that the base of the product would be more of a balm. This didn’t really help, so instead of putting the final product in a container, we decided to use a lip gloss tube. Another thing we found challenging was brainstorming ways to make our new business successful. We weren’t sure how to properly promote our product to make it a convincing product to buy. As a result, we decided to use the internet. We made a blog that we put our research and updates on some of our progress:

PROJECT ANALYSIS This product turned out to be somewhat of a success, but what we originally set out to do, we didn’t complete successfully. We were not able to make more than a test product, so as a result, we were not able to sell anything. The idea of making a business out of this would take much more work, planning and time. We are unable to call this result a success because we didn’t get as far as we expected to be. We overestimated hoe much work we could accomplish and how much progress we could make in 6 weeks time.

HOW DID WE HELP? The sites we used to share our knowledge were our blog and WikiHow, we made a post to contribute our insight from our experience

QUESTIONS?