School Highlight: Chantilly High School Shares Their Success, Challenges, and How They Plan to Adjust to COVID19

School Highlight:

Chantilly High School Shares Their Success, Challenges, and How They Plan to Adjust to COVID19

Chantilly High School is located in Chantilly Virginia with around 2,800 students. We called their team to hear their challenges, solutions, and ideas to help fuel your school based enterprise (SBE) or school store. 

Overview:

Joining us to talk about their team were students Haerin, Nitya, and Emma as well as their advisor, Karyn Jones. The Chantilly team has a school kiosk, a coffee shop, and a Spirit Box to sell their goods.

Location: Gym lobby

Revenue: 

$750-1000 monthly 

Team Members: 3-4 people 

The Spirit Box is run by their class that meets every other day. They have their core team members who manage the box and then the rest of the class rotates to help when needed. This class runs the school kiosk as well as the Spirit Box and are all working together to manage both school stores. 

Selling Tips and Strategies

Spirit gear and non-consumable items that did well

Within their Spirit Box they would sell t-shirts and other Spirit gear focused around different events, games, and seasons. They realized that freshmen and sophomores buy the most spirit gear because they are new to school and don’t have school shirts yet. They sold a variety of spirit gear for athletic events such as pink out shirts for breast cancer awareness, black out shirts, and shirts that were for school events. Other products that did well were pencils, gum, and deodorant. 

Adjusting to Covid19

With the uncertainty of this new school year, Chantilly Spirit Box team had a few ideas to adjust to this new environment. Advisor, Karyn Jones, would like to open an online platform to sell their Spirit Box items if schools are online. Once items are purchased, they would potentially have two Fridays a month for customers to come pick up their purchases.

If schools reopen, their plan is to primarily focus their attention on the Spirit Box instead of the school kiosk and coffee shop. Spirit Box allows customers to maintain social distancing and limit social interactions. They also plan to sell face-masks with school colors and different designs. 

Location Selection

They chose the gym lobby for the location of their Spirit Box because not only do students interact with it but parents and the community also purchase from it during athletic events and other events hosted in the gym. This gave parents the opportunity to purchase Spirit gear during games. They realized that stocking hygiene items such as deodorant also began to sell well because after practices or after gym classes, students may have forgotten deodorant. 

Product Selection Strategies

When you start a retail business it is important to figure out what kind of products you want to sell and stock in your store or vending machine. The Chantilly team chose their products based on a class survey they sent out in a google form, talking to students in person at their school kiosk, and analyzing their data based on what was selling the best. Gum was an absolute best seller and they were restocking their machine weekly with gum. 

Successes and Challenges

Successes

Their biggest successes as a team was establishing their routine, pricing, and learning how to operate the machine itself. It was a big learning curve for them to take on this new project but they worked really hard as a team to learn how to run their Spirit Box, which was a really rewarding experience for their team. The students who already had experience were really good about training new students and guiding them on how the Spirit Box business works. 

Challenges:

As they introduced the Spirit Box to their school they ran into the challenge of getting the word out about what their Spirit Box was and where it was located. They realized the challenges of breaking their customer’s habits of only using the school kiosk. 

They worked on this by doing announcements in the morning explaining the new products they have in their Spirit Box and what it cost to purchase. By increasing communication on what their Spirit Box was more people began to purchase from it. In order to continue to overcome these challenges they plan on making advertising and marketing a large goal of theirs for the next school year. 

What Chantilly learned this past year running a Spirit Box

• Listening to other people’s ideas, managing purchases, working with other people. 

• Customer service: is their priority. 

• How to track sales 

  • Advertise items 

  • Analyzing what items worked well and what didn’t

Why Chantilly recommends a Spirit Box to other schools

As a team they agreed it is very convenient to sell items for cash and cashless sales. Chantilly could only accept cash at their kiosk so having a cashless sales option helped funnel cashless sales to their Spirit Box instead of turning people away. Here are a few other areas why they recommend Spirit Box to other schools:

• Easy to track sales online

• Easy for students to use

• Easy customers to not have to go to the school store

• It allows for 24/7 sales to students, teachers, and the community

Chantilly is SBE Certified by DECA running a school store kiosk, a Spirit Box, and a coffee shop in their school. They have diversified their School Based Enterprises by not only having a school store but a variety of revenue streams. When COVID19 affected their businesses, they now plan to focus their energy on the Spirit Box to reduce human interactions. Within business having diverse revenue streams will help maintain consistent business when one area of the business may be struggling.