Retail group: progress

During our last meeting we broke up our gathered research topics and researched over the weekend. My content was looking at how to make sure the retail space and signage was taking into account ADA and people that are colorblind's needs. Below is the content I found and included in our joint document.

We plan to have two drop points in the art building, in the office and the design lab. We chose these locations because they can be monitored so we can be sure that items are not removed by students. On the day of we decided that having a box for each category/concentration of supplies would be a good idea so the supplies can be organized from the start and they would be ready to sell each spring.

ADA

http://www.ada.gov/business/retail_access.htm

While we do not need to worry about some of this since our academic building is accessible we do need to make sure that the space we layout has large enough walkways for people with disabilities to maneuver freely. Have signage lower to the ground and in higher locations to make it easier for all customers.

Pricing

If the group heading the selling portion in the spring intend to sell the items, and not give them away for free we suggest they base their prices off of other consignment shops. This is rate is about 30%-40% of the purchase price.

We feel the best way to display pricing would to be place colored stickers on each product, along with organizing items by price. Then it was brought to our attention to think about people that are color blind, so I found this resource (http://www.colourblindawareness.org/business/. I feel that our best bet is to write/type the price ($2,$5, etc) on the sticker. This will lessen confusion and make pricing understandable. We also intended to create signage explaining the color/pricing system but since the price will be included this signage is unnecessary.

Today during class the group started to work on the problem of what the bins should look like to store/hold the supply donations on the day of event. Another student has cardboard boxes that she can receive from her work that are gentle used. Our plan is to spray paint them and add signage/labels stating which concentration the contents are for. We felt that reusing the boxes worked into our projects idea of repurposing and reusing. We did not feel that we would be following our own ideas very well if we were running around buying new bins to hold the donations in.

Much of class time was spend coordinating with other groups, especially the advertising and installation groups. This is because we have to check that what we are doing fits the look and feel of what the advertising team wants; we also need to make sure we are not working on the same documents. We need to be sure that we are not taking jobs from the installation team when we work with the boxes.

To keep these groups separate we have worked out that the installation group is handling the "drop boxes" up through the day of the event and my team will handle the boxes for the main day of donating. My team is also designing the price stickers for the future sale of the items and signage for the day of boxes.

Today we bought the stickers that will be used for pricing. They are Avery 1" diameter circular labels (6450). I chose these because it was the smallest size I could find in an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet and the package came with so many labels. The label paper is almost capable of going through laser and inkjet printer which I felt was an important quality for the labels.