How To Teach Entrepreneurship to Children (Age 6-7) - NariShakti How To Teach Entrepreneurship to Children (Age 6-7) | NariShakti Humane ClubMade with Humane Club

How To Teach Entrepreneurship to Children (Age 6-7)

Published Sep 15, 2023
Updated Sep 24, 2023

Co-authored with Ritvvij Parrikh.

In our last update, we discussed how Sabi began her entrepreneurship journey with Snug Monsters, earning between ₹400-₹800 weekly by selling handmade bookmarks at our local park. She decided to use her earnings to cover 50% of her monthly guru dakshina for Seido Karate. That update concluded with events up to October 2022. Today, we bring you a follow-up to share her progress over the past year.


Summary

Numbers

In the last 12-months, she made around ₹18,000 across the year, out of which, she spent ₹14,000 on her Karate fees.

Fee payment page in journal

Sticking with it long term

In the last 12-months, she continued setting up her shop for at least 60% of the Sundays.

Sabi shows up on new year morning. Today, she is trying to stick a banner on the tree to attract customers.

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Theme of the year

Over the next few months she continued showing up and selling bookmarks! But we kept brainstorming how she can boost her income.

There were three clear directions that she could take:

  • Selling more Snug Monster Bookmarks
  • Increasing the price of the Snug Monster Bookmarks
  • Introducing new products

She explored each of these options over the past year.


Can She Sell More?

Sabi considered pitching Kunzum, a bookstore that she frequents. She made her pitch. However, despite multiple attempts, she was unable to meet with the store’s owner, leading her to abandon this idea.

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The Canadian Consulate in Chandigarh contracted Humane Club and Global Shapers Gurugram to organize events to showcase diverse career options for female students attending government-run schools.

I gave a subsequent contract to Sabi to supply 160 Snug Monster bookmarks, one for each student as part of the merchandise that would be provided to each student. Completing this sizable order within a tight schedule required discipline and meticulous planning on Sabi’s part.

Chandigarh – Govt Girls Sr. Secondary School (21st Jan 2023)
Gurugram – The Vidya School (27th Jan 2023)

Learning: This order came through mother’s company. This experience taught Sabi the benefits of bulk orders. She now had to figure out how to get bulk orders.

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Can She Raise the Price?

Sabi implemented four steps to increase her prices.

These changes helped increase her earnings without requiring additional effort.

  • She continued to ponder how she could increase prices further. By this time, she had been selling at the same spot in the same park every Sunday for almost 1.5 years. She began to realize that most people who might be interested in buying from her had already purchased her products.

Bookmarks 2.0

Sabi introduced new designs today. The designs are refreshingly different. She is hoping that her old customers will repeat purchase from her. Additionally, these designs should allow her to charge a premium.

Old designs
New designs

As it turned out, customers were willing to buy these new designs for ₹20 each. The new designs were interesting enough to convince existing customers to purchase a new Snug. Additionally, previously customers were buying only one bookmark. Now that there are so many different designs, customers are open to buy multiple bookmarks!

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Can She Sell New Products?

Over several months, we brainstormed various products that Sabi could add to her lineup. These ranged from growing and selling vegetables to pottery and handmade masks. However, each of these ideas presented its own set of challenges, making them unfeasible for mass production.

Sell books?

As the next step in her entrepreneurship journey, she considered writing down her learnings about Indic religions and sell a book. We bought a scrapbook and helped her produce one polished copy. She was extremely proud.

Conclusion: It took her 3-4 weeks to produce one copy. She realized that there was no way she can mass-produce these books manually. So she dropped the idea of selling the book.

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Sell masks?

Carnatic Cafe, one of our favorite local restaurants serves ice cream in coconut shells. Sabi had been collecting and saving these shells! One day, she decided to carve them into wall-hangings. For the next few weeks, she carved them into “Monkey Masks.”

Conclusion: She concluded that sourcing enough coconut shells would be a challenge. She cannot keep ordering ice cream to get raw material. Additionally, carving the eyes and nose took her almost 6-8 hours. Finally, there isn’t much utility of the mask.

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Sell toy to scare mother?

Sabi used toilet paper rolls to make an innovative product. She tied one end with a balloon, made a lid, and filled it with torn colorful paper. She would then sneak up behind her mother, pull the balloon, and release it. A loud sound would follow, and paper bits would pop out like a confetti blast.

Conclusion: She knew that the family won’t generate a consistent supply of toilet paper rolls. Her plan was to go around asking neighbors for used toilet rolls. Eventually, she dropped the plan due to hygiene concerns.

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Sell pottery?

Sabi has always been interested in pottery. As Snug Monsters progressed, one of the new product ideas that she proposed was selling pottery that she would build. Hence, we took her to Tugbug Studio in Delhi to get her to try her hand at pottery.

Conclusion: After a ₹600-per-hour session, she managed to make two tiny pots. It was good fun, however, she realized that she couldn’t mass-produce these as she could the bookmarks.

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Sell vegetables?

Last year, Sabi decided that she can start selling vegetables as part of Snug Monsters. We let her try! She planted tomatoes, onions, and potatoes and took care of the plants for 5-6 months! She finally harvested in mid 2023.

Conclusion: Eventually, she realized that she won’t be able to bulk grow vegetables in her balcony. Nonetheless, we had amazing fresh vegetables for salad. 🙂

Harvest 1: February 1-20, 2023

Harvest 2: March 31, 2023

Harvest 3: April 2, 2023

Harvest 4: May 25, 2023

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Sell tea leaves?

We love drinking tea at our house. Over the years, Sabi has seen us collect and appreciate various types of white, green, and pu-erh tea, as well as teaware. She has always been interested in drinking tea, but of course, as a seven-year-old, she can’t. I’ve told her that we’ll buy her some basil tea so she can brew it and join us.

The arbitrate opportunity. One day while buying our weekly groceries, we noticed that basil leaves were available at a huge discount. The website Fast and Fresh was selling 50 grams of fresh basil leaves for ₹3, whereas they typically cost around ₹10-20. This presented an interesting arbitrage opportunity—what if we bought basil leaves in bulk and dried them to mass-produce basil tea?

Unsure of the final product and its unit economics, we purchased 1.5 kilograms of basil leaves for ₹93. Our grocery contact called us to confirm whether we really wanted 31 boxes of basil leaves. We confirmed that we did, and two days later, they were delivered.

Three days ago, we decided to make our own Basil Tea at home. We spent the rest of the day cleaning around 1.5 kilos of fresh Tulsi leaves, removing the stems. and steaming the leaves for 30-40 seconds in a rice cooker.

Steaming halts the oxidation process, thus preserving the leaves’ green color, rich flavor, and high antioxidant content. Finally, we laid out the leaves to dry.

Three days later, we had ~150 grams of dried Tulsi tea leaves.

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To test out the Basil tea leaves she dried, Sabi hosted a tea ceremony for us. The brewed tea turned out to be extremely fragrant but subtle in its flavor. Most importantly, this tea was caffeine-free and thus child-friendly.

In the next batch, we tried simmering the basil tea leaves in boiling water. This batch, when mixed with honey, produced an extremely strong, flavorful tea.

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All three of us looked at each other and concluded that this could be the next Snug Monster product!


Introducing Snug Monster Tea

We purchased ₹1000 worth of basil, which arrived a few days later.

We spent the subsequent days quickly cleaning, de-stemming, steaming, and drying the leaves. Our entire house began to smell like basil. This work had to be done in a time-bound fashion so the leaves retain their freshness.

The next problem was where to buy 50 gram air-tight boxes to package all of these dried leaves for sales. We contacted vendors on Indiamart.com and eventually selected a Ghaziabad based vendor who sold us 100 boxes for ₹3500, including shipping.

Measuring the dried leaves and packing the boxes introduced Sabi to how to use weighing machines. She eventually carefully measured and packed all the tea into 33 tea boxes!

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A comparative product on Amazon.com sold for ₹200. We decided to stick to that as our pricing. For the communication, we used Sabi’s shop’s photo as the primary photo because that is what her audience was used to. We retained the brand name Snug Monster. To justify the price, we highlighted the product purity:

  • Whole Leaf Tea
  • Caffeine Free
  • Home made
  • Hand made
  • Immunity Booster
  • Finally, we also put photos of how Sabi made the tea

Eager to test out whether customers will buy Tea, Sabi decided to setup her shop on Saturday morning itself. She ended up selling 3 boxes along with her usual Snug Monster Bookmarks. This boosted her weekly earnings from ₹600 per week to ₹1050!

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If I am not full of energy and not happy then customers don’t listen and stop. Customers want to have experience of buying from a child. They appreciate the effort so they support. Good packaging of the product attracts people. For example: Earlier boxes had different shades. People are getting confused if the tea is with milk or water. Hence, highlighting in packaging that it is tea and not chai is important and sales pitch.

Based on these insights, we changed the packaging.

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Reviews


Now a street hawker?

Buoyed by the success, we returned to the park the following day, ready to sell more ₹200 tea boxes. However, this time, security guards approached Sabi’s stall and asked her to leave. Sabi was shocked!

The guards, and later the park authorities, explained to us that they had been monitoring Sabi for the past 1.5 years. Until now, she had only been selling products priced between ₹1 and ₹10. Now that she had products worth ₹200, they considered her an official street hawker, as hawking was banned in the park.

We had to dismantle the shop immediately. A group of regular customers came to Sabi’s aid and protested the decision, but the park authorities were adamant. If she wanted to sell, she would have to do it outside the park, where all the other street hawkers—coconut sellers, ice cream stalls, and those selling chips and water—had set up their shops.

Sabi was extremely disappointed and nearly burst into tears.

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For the next month, we tried multiple other parks, but either the footfall was significantly lower or the visitors were not her target audience.


Yes! Am a street hawker.

Today, Sabi decided to return to our regular park and set up shop in the parking area next to the coconut vendor. She chose to wear the badge of “street hawker” proudly!

She had not showed up to her shop for over a month now. And in the first few minutes of setting up this shop, this happened 👇

An old man at the park

“You’re the Snug Monster girl! My friend told me he had bought bookmarks and tea from you. I’ve been looking for you. I want some too.”

As it turned out, she ended up achieving two days’ worth of sales in one day. The footfall was much higher, and customers had a greater intent to purchase as they left the park after their exercise. She ultimately sold out all Basil Tea Boxes.

  • Sabi gifted two boxes of tea to her Karate Teachers. One box she kept for herself.
  • This left her with 30 boxes.
  • She made ~₹2700 after deducting cost of fresh leaves and tin boxes.

Although this was a major disruption, she successfully navigated through it.

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There are travel restrictions in Delhi due to the upcoming G20 summit. Hence the foot fall at the park was drastically lower than usual. But what is important is that Sabi showed up and kept the shop open!

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Today, we woke up late and hurriedly prepared ourselves. Just as we started the car, Sabi realized she had forgotten to bring disposable cups. It turns out that most customers who purchase Snug Monster Tea like to sample it first, and without disposable cups, they wouldn’t be able to do so. She quickly went back upstairs, found the cups, and returned to the car. By the time we had set up the shop, foot traffic had decreased significantly. Eventually, she sold only ₹720 worth of product today.

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Sabi had a busy morning filled with lots of interesting talks with customers! Once again, she sold out all the Basil Tea boxes. Overall she sold product worth ₹620/-.

Today was extra special at the shop because besides selling the usual bookmarks and Basil Tea, Sabi brought some work-in-progress products to get early opinions from people.

Next weekend, Sabi is planning to sell 6 models of ISRO rockets and satellites that she’s been working on for many weeks. A big takeaway from today’s interaction with customers was that people are really curious about the technical details of the rockets.


Question a man asked – What do we call this rocket I said PSLV rocket he said tell it in its full name. I said POLAR SATELLITE LAUNCH VEHICLE.and he said what does polar mean I said I dont know he said polar means north and south extreme point.

Below is a conversation in Sabi’s words

So, including some info cards and videos alongside the 3D models might be a cool idea. The park where the shop is located often gets visits from government officials, and many of them showed interest in the rocket models today.

This feedback was awesome for Sabi, and now she has some good ideas to make her rocket and satellite models even more interesting for next weekend!

Meanwhile, a fresh batch of Basil Tea Leaves is drying, and with a bit of luck, they’ll be ready for the upcoming weekend.

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Utility of running Snug Monsters

Running Snug Monsters allows Sabi to apply things she learns in school in the real world.

Hindi

We live in Delhi but come from the western part of India. Given that, Hindi isn’t our first language. Over the years, we’ve tried to encourage Sabi to learn Hindi but to no avail. In the last 12 months, she finally found utility of learning Hindi because many of her customers, generally senior citizens, speak Hindi and she struggled to pitch her products to them.

Math

Every time a customer buys from her, she has to do basic addition and multiplication to calculate the price and subtraction to decide how much money to give back. Most customers are patient enough to wait till Sabi completes her calculation.


Thank You 🙏

We thank everyone who have purchased her products. Your support gives 7-year-old Sabi the opportunity to:

  • Sell, talk and pitch to unknown strangers of various age groups.
  • Realize everyday how important building and selling skills are
  • Recognize the utility of mathematics in daily life
  • Put in the work and only then expect output

Hopefully, Snug Monsters will continue for another year.