Challenges

We faced many obstacles to run this project. One of the obstacles we faced is coming up with a fixed price for our tarts. Our group members gave many price options and it was quite difficult to compromise with everyone and come up with a fixed price. In the end, to resolve this problem, we chose the best strategic price that was customer-friendly, especially for our target market as a large portion consisted of university students who are on a budget. That eventually brought some profit to our business.

Furthermore, another challenge that we faced is delivering the tarts to customers outside of International University of Malaya-Wales (IUMW). Initially, we planned to sell our tarts to customers inside and outside of the university but due to transportation issues to deliver the tarts to the customers, we were unable to do so. We did not have a suitable delivery service system as it requires consistency and each of us had uncertain schedules so we did not want to keep the customers waiting or postpone the delivery date. Therefore, to overcome this obstacle, we decided to change our target market to customers located inside IUMW.


Besides changing target market, our next issue is to maintain the quality of tarts because they are chilled cheese and chocolate so the chances of it going bad if not handled perfectly will increase. Our problem is to actually keep the tarts in a fridge but we don't have much time as time is precious so we brought it straight out of the fridge from home and sell it straight away during class to achieve maximum pleasure of taste and texture 😋😋 The tarts are best chilled but the morning chill is good enough to maintain the chillness of the tart 😎❄ What happen once was the bakery's fridge broke down so did our orders placed for the upcoming week.

As mentioned in our marketing strategy, we ordered our tarts from Orange Delight Cake house located in Selayang, Kuala Lumpur. One of our team members, Kesavan is in charge of picking up the tarts from the bakery house on the day that we plan to sell. Problems arose when he was sick and bedridden one day and he could not deliver the tarts to the campus. There was a power failure in the bakery shop on another day and the tarts could not be sold to us. On both occasions, we were left with no choice but to postpone our sales to the next day. To our surprise, these unforeseen circumstances actually brought out our tolerance and forgiveness towards each other. Every one of us were very understanding given the situation that we faced and this helped us to build stronger relationships with each other.

Moreover, another obstacle we faced was to find a suitable supplier for our products. We had difficulties finding the suitable supplier as some suppliers charged too high while some others were not operating around the KL area where we can collect the products. We also faced challenges when a few of our customers asked us for more variety of flavours but unfortunately, the supplier we chose only bakes two types of tarts which are cheese and chocolate tarts.

Finally, another obstacle that we faced to run our business is making the decision on packaging. During the planning of the project, we had no idea on what kind of packaging to use for the product. With the suggestion from Madam Syaida, we decided to check out Wakim Plastic Industry Sdn Bhd in Chow Kit. Although there was a wide variety to choose from, the choices we narrowed down to were very costly. The price that we would have to put to just make a slight profit was too expensive for a tart. Therefore, we continued looking and Khadijah managed to find plastic packaging that was cheap in Hero Supermarket. A packet which consisted of 10 regular-sized pieces was RM1.15, which meant that 1 piece was only RM0.12 (rounded off) whereas a packet of 10 large-sized pieces was RM1.60, 1 piece being only RM0.16.

🛒👀Our window shopping trip to Wakim Plastic Industry. Sdn Bhd and Mr DIY 😁