Having a student business has SO MANY benefits. Depending on what your product or service is, you have the opportunity to practice independence, money math, cooking, responsibility, and so much more! In this series, various guest bloggers (teachers & special educators) will share their tried and true experience of starting and running a student business for special education students. Hopefully these posts will give you some great ideas or inspire you to start a classroom business of your own to teach students valuable vocational & life skills! Up next is a classroom that sells artisan soaps and more!
How The Business Started:
When COVID hit, many vocational options for a mod/severe multi ability high school classroom went down the drain. Our previous businesses, the Discovery Brew Coffee Cart, Big Blue School Store, and other various tasks around the school we attended dried up. Just because all of our learning options were not available, did not mean we stopped needing opportunities to learn. So we turned on our creative juices, had a class discussion, Googled a lot, and came up with our own entrepreneurial endeavors of creating our very own online store.
Our store name was the Discovery Store, named after our program name “Discovery Learning Center,” and used our google suites to create a website and google forms for faculty and all staff in the district to order from.
Administration:
The first thing I did was make a to-do list that consisted of
- Get permission to make an online store
- Funds: Write donors choose for soap materials, write a purchase order for sped department to buy extra materials.
- Make website for store
- Make google forms for faculty and staff to order from
- Make soap
- Make digital and printed fliers to send to faculty and staff and post in high school
- Check google forms for orders
- Send out confirmation emails to people who sent orders
- Send out pickup email to let people know their order is ready
We started our business making greeting cards as our main source of revenue, then moved onto holiday cards and ornaments in the winter, and our spring shop became our favorite as we all learned how to make artisanal soaps!
To make our website, I sent emails to my supervisor, tech department, financial department, and administration to ask what would need to be done legally to allow us to post pictures, sell items, ect. Using our Google school drive. I was asked to get permission forms completed by families allowing each student to be featured on the website, for those students who did not give permission, they were used as a hand model or in other pictures that did not show their face, but still allowed them to be a part of the process. I had asked our financial department about an online purchasing system, however that became a pipe dream for the future hopefully, and instead we required cash or check purchases sent through interoffice mail, or given directly to our classroom during “shop hours.” We turned our classroom into a business one day a week, in the mornings we made soap, in the afternoons we packaged and sold them.
I started this journey during summer school with my students while we were zooming remotely from our homes. I first spoke with my administration about this idea of making an online store and they supported us through the entire process. My Sped director was able to secure some funds to help us purchase items for soaps that were not on the donors choose that I had just submitted. In the end I wrote a large Donors Choose order of just under $1000.
Supplies:
I Tweeted, Facebooked, traded donations, and much more and was able to raise the funds in less than a month. To figure out what items we needed, I tasked my class with researching through Pinterest, Google searches, and You Tube videos on how to make artisanal soaps. Watching the videos we realized that melt and pour would be the quickest to learn, and would give us lots of room for creativity. We made a list of items such as soap base, scents, micha dye colors, glitters, dried flowers and more. We then made an amazon wish list which we turned into our donors choose materials.
Suggested Materials:
Student Tasks:
While we waited for materials to arrive, I tasked my students with finding videos and creating directions for soaps they want to make. We chose as a team 6 different soaps we wanted to try, citrus scent, coffee scent, rose sugar scrub, lemon, mint, and unscented. When our materials arrived we had a huge unboxing party, creating an inventory list, and organizing/labeling where all our materials would be housed.
With the students directions, I attempted to make one of all the different soaps, making edits to the directions and adding pictures and vocabulary terms to the steps. The next day we did our first attempt at making soap. We had to go over how to use the soap cutting materials safely, practiced setting up our soap making area and putting things away, and finally were able to chose colors, scents, and melt the soap. The first week was a learning process, we got to see how long you need to microwave the soap base for, how much time you have to add the scent and color before it hardens, and decide which mould looked best for each soap. We realized we needed much more soap than we had anticipated. Trial and error soap we kept and used in our classroom bathroom… we had a lot of it. Once we got the hang of it, students were able to work with staff to follow multi part steps and create two colored soaps, add flowers, and create their own scent blends.
I forgot to mention that during all of this, I had only half of my class in person and the other half remote. What do I do with the remote students? I had them participate in the research, writing steps, and then instead of watching us make the soap, they went off with staff to create our online ordering forms. They had to add photos of the soaps that my students had taken with our photography teacher, they had to add prices, and make sure they asked for contact information of the customer. Once orders were live, the online students were in charge of checking the order forms and notifying us when we needed to make an order, who it was for, what they wanted, and how much it would be. They learned how to email customers and give vital information like confirming orders, giving totals, and telling information on how payment and pickup happens.
This project started over the summer as a dream, became a reality around february, and created jobs and revenue for my students by june. We ended up making around $500, and have plenty of materials to continue to make soaps this year as well. Teachers were so impressed that word got out to our local newspaper and radio station. My students got the chance to interview with a reporter and get professional photos taken of them working. Our class cannot wait to get back to school and learn even more entrepreneurial skills.
Thanks for reading!
Emily Borden
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