Marigold & Grey Hosts Girls Field Trip for Aspiring Business Owners

Sometimes you do something to give back and you end up getting more in return than you ever could’ve imagined.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to welcome young girls into our warehouse who are interested in business ownership, but I never knew the right way to go about it. You get busy, life happens, and it always remains on your “should do” list. When we were recently asked by The Madeira School to host a field trip, it was immediately YES.

But what to do with a group of twelve 10 year olds that would demonstrate what we do on a level they can comprehend AND keep them engaged for an entire day? With expertise from our resident former teacher Casey, we planned an entire curriculum for them to include the history of the business, an in-depth tour of our operations, a role play of our design process and client experience, and three hands-on activities where we challenged them to do EXACTLY what we do.

To kick off the hands-on activities, we introduced them to our sample room and showed them how to do curate a gift by assessing items for size, aesthetic, color palette, and appropriateness for the gift’s theme.

Next, was the e-commerce challenge. They first got to choose a pre-designed gift box from our collection to learn how to assemble it and tie an M&G bow to our standards. (The camper who got closest to how their gift appears our on our website got to keep their gift box!)

Last but not least - the “custom gift design challenge”. We broke them into groups and gave them a real life client scenario and tasked them with curating a custom gift that met their client’s requirements. We set up a “marketplace” with tons of packaging options and gift contents to choose from with wholesale and retail prices listed for each, allowing them to make decisions on how to balance aesthetic, theme, size and shape, and budget. At the end, they had to present their curations to the group and “sell us” on the design, explaining why they selected each item and where they landed on price (mirroring the exact process we use when designing for our real life clients). The winning team got M&G Yetis to take home.

At times, I worried that what we were teaching was over their head for their age. But then they’d raise their hands and ask the most intelligent, insightful, observant question and we quickly learned never to underestimate this bunch. They were hard working, creative, detail oriented, and gave each task their all. They were competitive too, and wanted to win. They blew us away with their curations – I actually got tears in my eyes when they were doing their presentations in witnessing how much they absorbed in just one day with our team.

I wanted the girls to leave with an understanding that they while they don’t have to know what type of business they want to start, they do need to take every single experience they have to learn as much as they can because eventually when they DO decide what business they want to start, they’ll be well equipped to make it happen.  I wanted them to know that what they start out doing in life does not have to be where they end up. And that they can make a business out of an idea even if it’s a business they’ve never seen before – that the sky is the limit.

What they left us with, though, feels even more significant. We saw the girls wide-eyed and fascinated by what we do. We saw them push themselves. We saw them work together as team with girls they’d only known for a week. At times they disagreed, but as in real life business, they worked it out. We saw them proud of their accomplishments. We saw them crunching numbers and disappointed when what they wanted to include in the gift box design exceeded what their client had budgeted for, causing them to make hard decisions. We saw them asking for help when they needed it and others refusing help because they wanted the satisfaction of doing it on their own – both equally important in business. And we saw them leave feeling inspired.

It might be gift boxes and ribbon tying to some, but to us, this day was much bigger. I witnessed the impact we can have as a business beyond doing what we do every day for clients. We get lulled into thinking that what we do is no big deal because we’re used to it but to a young aspiring entrepreneur it can plant the seed that will grow into a thriving business one day. This is everything. A huge tank you to The Madeira School for trusting us to host your girls. It’s a day we will never forget!