Week 11

Fresh Patches

This week was dedicated to the Shark Tank invention of Fresh Patches. This product is an alternative to pee pads; it give dogs another place to do their business while also feeling nice for them.

The product is a patch of grass that could be used for a variety of reasons. It would be ideal for dog owners that live in the city that don't have much time to walk their dogs so the dog would be able to get on some grass. The grass is absorbent and does not leave an odd smell after the dog uses the bathroom.

It is distributed from California, yet the creator is from Florida. The shipping costs is a large margin crusher when it comes to the income of the business. Yet the product itself is doing well selling 1 million dollars worth of product in the last year. That is going off of 550 returning customers that will buy the product for $25 every two weeks after the grass is no longer good.

On Tuesday we were able to watch the episode of what Fresh Patches was all about. In the end Fresh Patches was able to make a deal with Cuban and Barbara to be able to open up a distribution center on the east coast and also revamp their website and online work, so that the creator is able to focus more on the company as a whole.

After watching the episode we were told to make a income statement for the product itself. We were only given a small bit of information on what was actually in the income statement so at first it was a bit challenging. Talking with our groups for a bit, we then talked as a class to create a true income statement where we saw that the variable expenses of the shipping was a large expense that would need to be focused on for Fresh Patches to achieve success in the end.

Thursday was more analysis on Fresh Patches. We looked more into their market strategy and into some of the secondary data that they would be going after. In a study conducted before we were able to see some numbers that relate to how many dog owners their are in certain demographic areas.

We tried to narrow down the specific Target Market of the Fresh Patches. We decided that it would be a dog lover that is usually busy that lives in an urban area with a higher than average income. With this in mind we used the secondary data to narrow down exactly how big the market would be that we would be dealing with. Yet, looking at the data we had lots of the numbers were said to be unreliable because there wasn't a large amount of these types of people in the study conducted.

Having this knowledge in mind, if we were working for Fresh Patches we would realize that we might need to expand our market in some way or find another source of secondary data that would help us be more accurate on the information we need to know. Fresh Patches seem to be striving at the moment so I feel they have figured out what they need to be doing, especially from the help of Barbara and Cuban.