The event was held at the beautiful Wharton San Francisco location last Thursday March 23rd, and was a great way for Wharton entrepreneurs to connect and meet with an audience of design enthusiasts. To someone who is getting started with her business and hasn’t launched, the chance to talk to potential customers and answering their questions was golden. We received great product feedback, and listened to how stylish health conscious ladies saw themselves wearing our Cami-Top. The days leading up to the event were a whirlwind of to-dos with many details to cover, from coordinating with our sample maker to ensuring we would have the product on time with labels and product inserts. Given everything I needed to get done before the event it felt almost like a miracle to have been there with our samples!
Getting ready for the event!
The crowd ranged from entrepreneurs to investors, to people who were there to learn and check out the products. Then there was one dad and his daughter who drove from Sacramento to attend the event in San Francisco. Abriana is an 8th grader who wants to have her own fashion company and her dad David is helping her realize her vision. They were so nice and I couldn’t help but think that if all dads were like David our world would be in such good shape.
Talking to attendees about our products and answering their questions was definitely an enlightening experience. It was great hearing about how the ladies thought they could use our cami-top, how they liked the fabrics (the general feedback was that the Lenzing Modal was super soft) and the concept of the sweat-shield. I was a little nervous when introducing our sample and relating to my own experience was helpful. I learned that it is a good idea to ask people to come to the booth and actually touch and check out your product, and also that our cami top looks much better when it is worn by someone that on the rack.
Showing the quality of the fabrics we are using on the cami-top.
The learnings came not only from interacting with all participants but also from the fantastic entrepreneurs who participated in the panel: Stacey Chang from Veerah, who makes incredibly beautiful shoes, Joanne Huang from Alamere Designs who makes amazing super comfortable technical clothes for outdoor adventurers, and Priscilla Tsai from Cocokind who makes awesome natural skin products. These ladies are rocking their businesses and making their vision a reality, which in turn helped me with my vision of how to make my business successful. We even got to meet with Karl Ulrich, the Vice-Dean of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Wharton. Karl had an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign with the Belle-V Ice cream scoop when he raised almost 1300% of his goal, and he generously shared some of his learnings with us.
This was an great event I am super grateful to have participated in, thanks to Alice Zhang and the Wharton Alumni Club who organized the event. I am also grateful to my incredible friend Ashmi who was there all along to provide moral support and help with booth setup, pictures and even making introductions to attendees. Presenting our first sample in a familiar environment gave me a good injection of confidence to continue with the work of refining our product and bringing it out into the world. The baby is growing!
