25A - What's Next?

Existing Market
For this step of the assignment, I interviewed my three friends Robby, Declan, and Raina.
I talked to them about the next step for my venture, which would be to expand into the action sports world and provide a shoe cleaning product for items such as snowboarding boots. Robby and Raina are big into action sports such as snowboarding and wakeboarding and thought that this would be a good path to take. However, Declan is not as big into this and thought the best next route to take would be to use a similar idea on clothing items. He was envisioning a quick stain cleaner or something of that sort in case clothes get dirty, either out while camping or such, or while at something as trivial as a family party.

I believe that a combination of both of these feedbacks would be the best possible route for my company. This growth would essentially go into all areas of clothing, and would thus encompass a much larger market. The product would then be a fit for anyone, and of all lifestyles rather than those who are more active than others. There would be an item for everyday use, an item for those who are into action sports, and even the casual person who might want to clean a mark on their suit on the way to a business meeting.
This would also keep the appeal of being a cheap product made for people on the go. There would need to be some adjustments to make sure that each product is safe to use on the materials that it would be used on, however, I do not believe this would be a major factor. It would be pretty much the same idea as the shoe cleaning service, but it would be spread to all apparel items that could become dirty.


New Market
A market that is radically different from the one that I'm currently pursuing would be senior citizens. While the elderly are not as active as younger people, they typically do not like change and like for things to like neat. Because of this, they would be able to use the cleaning product on all of their clothes and shoes and use them for extremely long periods of time, or until they break. For this, I interviewed both of my grandparents on my dad's side of the family. They said they could see themselves using the product on their clothes and shoes, but said that they would struggle to see the extremely elderly ever using it since it does require some physical energy. They also said that since they are not as active as a thirty-year-old, they would only infrequently need to purchase this.

I did have some interesting findings from interviewing my grandparents. I was relatively surprised that they said they would use the product and could see others their age using it as well. This is relatively what I thought they would say, as most people would at least like to own a product that is capable of quickly cleaning stains and blemishes on clothing articles.
However, I was also correct in thinking that this would be a relatively small market. I find it hard to believe that many senior citizens would be purchasing this product, and my interviewees saying that they would be infrequent buyers affirms this belief. Because of this, this market is not as desirable as the original market of 20-30-year-old active citizens. Despite this, it did prove to me that there is at least a little market for those who are older.