That Girl from Derwent dwells on the value of religion this Christmas.
That Girl from Derwent has learned a few more things about prejudice since moving up North.
That Girl From Derwent reckons if you're going to be offensive, you should find a better reason.
That Girl from Derwent considers why it is that some words have wider implications than others.
The challenge today was a straightforward selling task. Each team was given a box of 60 items of jewellery obtained by the charity Newlife, who offer support in the form of advice or financial help to children with disabilities and their carers. Each item of jewellery had an RRP which would be considered the base price. We had to sell the jewellery but couldn’t sell it lower than this base price and the teams that would go through would be the team that made the most return from selling the jewellery above the base price.
We split the team in two and sold in pairs, with Mike and Anne-Sophie hitting the north side of campus and Cesca and I hitting the south side. The weather was great so we hoped we would catch the campus traffic between 12 and 3 and sell the majority of our jewellery then. The challenge was hard not only because there were 16 other teams selling on campus, but because students are especially price-conscious and, considering most of the jewellery was made for women, guys were effectively put out of action for the direct selling part of this challenge. We hit James and Halifax hard and then concentrated our efforts near the sports centre and then Vanbrugh for the majority of the day.
We generated £254 turnover of which £154 was profit above the RRP. That put us comfortably through to the next round.
Yet again another selling task but today we only had ten teams left in the cut. Challenge today was to spend one hour thinking of a service and then putting that service into action within the confines of campus. This was an especially difficult task because most of campus had now known to avoid any group of four or two holding something, especially in Vanbrugh; many of my friends said they avoided Vanbrugh deliberately because they knew what was going on. Either way, the conditions were the same for everyone so we carried on starting with a 'cool station' offering massages, cold drinks, sun cream and shades.
The weather was scorching so it was easier to sell the service. However at 1pm, York Entrepreneurs decided to restart the whole challenge, this time with the stipulation that we could only sell a service which had no tangible product attached to it. Our team had a short thinking session and after a few phone calls to check out the feasibility of some ideas, we booked ourselves six kitchens, headed to Somerfield to buy some cleaning kit with our £10 budget and gave ourselves three hours to clean seven kitchens between four of us.
I’m never doing anything like this again. Some kitchens were inhumane - I always thought I’d seen the worst kitchens in university halls, but what I saw on this challenge, especially one example, was just unreal!
Nevertheless, we trooped and made a cool sum of around £100 and that put us again through to the next challenge. Now there were only six teams left.
This was a two day challenge; I was glad because I was kind of getting fed up with annoying people on campus and trying to sell them items they may or may not have wanted. Today we had to think of a drink and come up with a poster and a TV advert to go with it with the assistance of YSTV for the filming. This task was the first task team mBezel felt at home with; presentations, posters, design and marketing were our key strengths.
We chose to market a fizzy drink for adults that we branded Fruish, the name derived from a combination of the word fresh and fruit, the core ingredients of our product. The hardest part of this challenge was the filming and planning. I have never put so much work into 30 seconds and laughed at the result. Sitting in the editing suite with YSTV and seeing some of the shots on screen, Mike and I who were editing just couldn’t stop laughing at the sheer shock of how bad some of the shots looked.
Alex from YSTV had skills though, and we managed to make what was ten seconds of just about good shots from the eight minutes of film we had last 30 seconds. Alex, you’re a star, you saved us on this round. The ad was simple so we had an array of effects and tricks we could apply to the film to make it look that little bit better.
The pitch for the idea was tough and we came under criticism for copying the idea from Marks & Spencer, which we defended well, pointing out that while it was in some ways similar, we were trying to capture a mood rather than a sensation. We were also criticised for copying a slogan from another existing drink which we again partly defended, but then given the rules stated that we could, we just took the criticism as is and moved on.
The cut was close again on day four, and now four teams were left.
The next challenge was a two day challenge once again. On day one, one team was going to get kicked out depending on how their idea stood up against criticism from a panel of judges and against the three other ideas being pitched. We had two hours to come up with an event concept and plan and book acts and create a poster. Everything on the poster had to be at the event and on our event poster, we had six acts who we guaranteed would perform. Some of the acts were on the edge and not sure, so Mike’s persuasion skills came in hand.
We effectively split the team into four separate roles: raffle sales, headed by Cesca; freebies and prizes, headed by Anne-Sophie; Mike booked the majority of the acts including the Hoff; and I was responsible for making sure the event passed all health and safety restrictions as well as organising the proceeding and order of the night. Event organising was by far our strongest skill: all four of us, especially Mike and I, had organised much larger events. However the key here was that we only had 24 hours to put the idea in place.
All I can say is that this challenge was close; Team Vivacity could sell their raffle tickets very well and we knew they would hit the 400 to 500 mark on raffle tickets which equated to 250 people at the event. They did however bid 72 people for their venue so that lowered this number to around 190 people. They had Derwent with a 190 capacity and we had Vanbrugh with a 180 capacity. Calibre, who had been very strong over the last three days, also had a great event and they only bid two for their venue so four raffle tickets outweighed that, whereas we bid 34 people for Vanbrugh so had to sell at least 68 to cancel out the bid. From the word go, we had to sell just enough tickets in the raffle and get on average 30 to 40 more people through our door than the other teams to stand a chance of winning. This came down right to the wire.
When the event started at 7.30pm we immediately had about 70 people, a result of promising free Subways and Millie's cookies. The first count was done at around 7.45pm, while quite a few of these people were still inside, so the first count was good. However 15 minutes later around 30 were left, but then over the next 30 minutes around 100 people came through the door and stayed to watch the acts in the JCR. The JCR in Vanbrugh held around 60 people and it was always packed, which left the bar very free and allowed us to catch many more passers by who heard the music or were curious.
The acts that performed were great, and around 120 stayed throughout the night, which was a great figure. At the same time Anne-Sophie and Cesca were selling raffle tickets hard.
We ended up winning by 14 people which is a very close figure. Those 14 could have been swayed by anything from the weather to free food to the quality of the event; we may never know, but I was just glad we won. So much work had gone into the last six days that we were just glad our final push paid off.
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