Students also learned about marketing, customer service

MOSES LAKE — The market in the meeting room at Columbia Basin Technical Skills Center on Saturday morning looked like — and was — a place to get bargains. But it was also a lesson in marketing, money management and business formation.

Melody Jenson, instructor for the entrepreneurship and marketing class, said the project grew out of a unit on personal finance. Knowing how to manage money is a crucial skill, Jenson said, and part of that is understanding savings.

One of the lessons is building a savings account, and that was the rationale behind the Saturday market — well, that and learning some of the nuts and bolts of marketing and business formation.

Students worked in groups to form their own mini-stores, coming up with a theme, a name and a line of merchandise. Since it was a real-world exercise they had to find the merchandise too.

The class already runs its own store, called Pallets and Pipes. Merchandise from Pallets and Pipes was mixed in with the individual stores. The students also worked with the culinary class, which baked cinnamon rolls and cookies to be sold during the event.

Students in the video game design class and the school’s Future Business Leaders of America chapter opened the classroom to show people the games they’ve designed and to give kids a place to play while moms and dads shopped the mini-stores.

“We made the store to help build our own savings accounts,” said Brandon Sanchez, one of the proprietors of NW Style. “We each have custom tags — there’s yellow, pink and green for certain people in the class — if those sell, those students get the money, and if it’s a brown tag we all split it. The proceeds that we make, we put them into our individual savings accounts. We’re going to learn how to manage it, how to spend it wisely, how to save it wisely.” The goal is for each student in the class to save at least $500, said Karina Bernal, a co-owner of NW Style.

Brandon, Karina and Michelle Ibarra built NW Style around their appreciation for West Coast style, Brandon said. “We posted on social media, we went and asked our friends, family members and other people that we know to see if they had clothes they don’t wear or home decor they don’t use, to bring them in to help support us,” he said.

Adamari Guerrero and Guadalupe Castrellon built their brand around a range of potential options for customers, but focusing on the teen market. They mixed prom dresses and jeans, shoes and home decor. “We try to have a little bit of everything to make it look more welcoming and like people would want to shop at our store,” Adamari said.

It’s been a long-term project. “We were planning two months ago,” Guadalupe said.

“But it took us three weeks to (collect donations), and it took us a week to organize and set up,” Adamari said. It took a lot of driving around to pick up all the merchandise, “and a lot of bagging, bringing it to the store, tagging, pricing, all of that stuff.” And then they had to make sure the store was attractive to customers when it came time to open, Guadalupe said.

And while it was a lot of work it was also good experience, the students said, and gave them skills they can use after they graduate. “It was — interesting,” Brandon said.

“It was a fun, hard-working experience,” Karina said.

The kids had to figure out how to mesh their different ideas, which wasn’t always a smooth process. “Our class, we’re very close to each other — we’re really good friends,” Brandon said. “But once we started working with each other, it’s a different story. But that’s also a learning process, because we learned how to work with most types of people.”

“How to get along with future co-workers,” Karina said. “It just shows you, it’s different when it’s serious and different when you’re not serious.”

“Customer service is a big one,” Adamari said. “Financing, a lot about money management, we learned a lot about how to set up. Organization is a big skill too. Patience.”

They learned presentation, Guadalupe said, how to display their merchandise to its best advantage. “Teamwork was a big one too,” she said.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].