Enter: Banana Bank & $2000
It's still sinking in, but despite all of the last minute changes we kept making and the less than ideal amount of rehearsing we pulled through and won! I still have ways I want to improve the deck, but I don't think that's really a bad thing at all. If we had finalized everything on Thursday we would've still been in the business of collecting bananas, lacked a bag and all of the design work. I'm thrilled that all of the time I spent on design, mockups, the deck, even our photo-chopped visuals payed off—I mean it was fun to make either way, but now it really has purpose and it will be tangible soon. It just so happened that my parents were visiting this weekend, which I thought would be unfortunate b/c I'd have to take time away from them and spend it on the pitch—but I worked on it around them and they were invaluable as a sounding board while I was developing the design and feel of the logo and banana print. There's probably still room for polish and refinement in all the designs, but I'm thrilled about their reception so far.
On another note, now we have $2000 and it's time to take action. There's quite a bit to do in a lot of different directions, but I'm most concerned about the product production because the bag design we presented probably requires a full bleed which means custom oversees production. Custom oversees production sounds cool and all but that includes 4-8 weeks from order to delivery and often minimum orders of 5000 pieces, or if not the price is jacked up absurdly. I'm somewhat tempted to pursue additional funding to meet that minimum order, especially if we get our distribution straightened out. And say we could sell 5000 bags netting around 15k-20k we'll have to expand beyond bananas and could provide a lot of food for a lot of people. Still there are quite a few hurdles left before we get there. I've heard retail placement can be extremely difficult but we do have the perk of coming from the NPO/pro bono side of things which will help a bit I imagine. Also I know Joe Polish, a marketer who now organizes and leads a group called the GENIUS Network that John Mackey a co-founder of Whole Foods is in. I'm not sure how close Joe is to the John Mackey and it's a moonshot but there's a possibility he can get one of our designs and a small blurb about our concept in front of him and that could potentially take our local program national and make placement in Whole Foods a breeze. We're definitely not going to bet on that connection, but imagine if we had John Mackey a co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods behind us, even just a little bit?