AKA Woodcraft, an enterprise group made up of three transition year students from Ramsgrange Community School have been showcasing innovation through their handcrafter decorations which they have been selling both locally and nationally.
The group formed by Amy and Alision Duffin alongside Katie Foley formed their mini-company back in September. This is not their first time involving themselves in such a project with Amy and Alison having experience with setting up a variety of different enterprises throughout their time in the school.
As part of the transition year programme, all students were given an opportunity to set up their own enterprise to sell and showcase at the annual Ramsgrange Christmas Market. The three girls knew that this was a project they would be interested in pursuing and quickly got together to brainstorm potential ideas.
As part of their brainstorming process, they knew that they wanted to create a hand-crafted product that was also sustainable. All three students have an interest in woodwork which is also a hobby of both sets of parents so scrap wood was readily available. They decided that creating a product using the offcuts of wood would be the perfect idea as it would be cost effective, sustainable and also allow them to utilise their wood crafting and creative skills.
The group decided that they would create wooden decorations to be sold. As well as being decorative, they wanted to include a practical element so the decision to add key hooks beneath the decoration was made. Before production of the pieces commenced, the girls conducted market research which included distributing surveys to family and friends and the responses were very positive. One element which they wanted to get opinions on was the type of themes for the decorations that people would be interested in purchasing and there was a strong trend of interest for local and coastal themes which heavily influenced the designs of their early creations.
Production then got under way where the girls began by creating the base of the decorations and then adding the designs which included mini houses, lighthouses and local shops amongst others. The decorations were hand-crafted and hand painted individually with great attention to detail. The early stages required a lot of trial and error with weight distribution and product efficiency but it wasn’t long until they got the formula right.
The annual Ramsgrange Christmas Market, held in the school, was their first main opportunity to showcase and sell their product and it proved very successful with many customers even requesting their own custom designs to be made. Following on from the Ramsgrange market, the group exhibited at the annual Gifted Design and Craft Fair in the RDS where their decorations were equally as popular.
On top of their commercial success, the girls entered both the Student Enterprise Programme which is run by the Network of Local Enterprise Office of Ireland and is the country’s largest student enterprise programme as well as the Foróige Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which is a world recognised, youth entrepreneurship education and development programme.
In order to prepare for the two competitions, the girls prepared a report based on a product journal and then attended an interview stage in New Ross where judges questioned them on their whole product process. Following on from this stage, the group were successful and progressed to the Wexford finals which were hosted by the Local Enterprise Office in Wexford County Council and took place at the beginning of March. Within this stage of the competition, the three girls competed against over 30 different groups in their Senior Category. Impressively the group was awarded overall winner in their category and will now go on to represent Wexford at the National Finals in Mullingar in May.
On top of their SEP success, the students also attended the NFTE competition however, unfortunately they were not successful on this occasion, they are eager to continue to grow and develop their enterprise.
