Pin me!

BY SARA KEDDY

Kings County Register

Working with money and selling stuff are two good reasons to be in business.

Youth behind the Junior Achievement company, Pin Point Press, have just filed their 2008 shareholders report. While they didn’t break even, they learned some big lessons.

“Without the right organizational skills, things can get out of hand and confused very easily,” third-year JA member Leta Lowthers reports.

“It’s hard to think of a product that you can sell to a broad market,” Chantal Blaire said.

“It’s hard to be motivated when the group doesn’t like the product,” Jessica Kenny said.

The group, down to six from a dozen members by the end of the project, took in students from Central Kings and West Kings, meeting in Cambridge with a few community business advisors and Michelin sponsorship to get them started and keep them on track. While they started out with the “riveting” work of setting company bylaws and filing positions, Lowthers said, the brainstorming of what to actually sell had some life.

The group looked at everything from speed dating, picture frames, bandannas, tire swings and frisbee clocks - “time flies - we even had a catchphrase,” said company president Jeffrey Nichols.

When a plan to start a free newsletter for local high schools fizzled - “approaching stores and asking them to give money to a bunch of high school students for advertising” didn’t work well, Kenny said; they settled on pins they could make themselves, focusing on Valley schools’ logos and slogans and some alternative designs using everything from old comic book pictures to designs sketched out then Photoshopped by Blaire, the vice president of information technology.

They rented a pin press and had two production nights.

“When you put the materials in, you had to make sure they were on the right way - the paper, the back all had to be one,” Lowthers said. Cutting the papers caused some trouble at first but, with an acceptable degree of production waste, they were off.

“A lot of kids have pins on their bags, and we knew we’d be able to sell them easily - we’re right in the school with them,” Kenny said. She shared marketing work with Cindy Power, both of them first-year JA members.

However, Power said, “you always start the year with a great idea - and then you see what happens.”

The pins sold but, without a bulk sale to West Kings - thanks to JA president Jeffrey Nichols’ other role as West Kings’ store co-manager - things wouldn’t have ended as well.

Pin Point Press paid all its bills and returned $6.25 of $10 originally invested by 30 shareholders.

Group members picked up lots of business savvy through the project, two even attending the JA Atlantic conference in Newfoundland.

Practically, Lowthers has just landed her first job at McDonalds: “the whole thing that got me the job, they said, was my leadership skills - they liked the fact I’d been at JA for three years, we knew how to fix problems and get things done.” Nichols works as a lifeguard, but was also able to start another JA project at West Kings this year, the Titans computerized business simulation. James Buchan works at Zellers and Kenny is the treasurer for the Kingston/ Greenwood Community Health Board.

As for next year, Kenny says she’ll return to JA - she’s already pitching an idea that didn’t make it through this year’s brainstorming: color changing T-shirts.

“I used to sell stuff, my old clothes - that always interested me.”