Epilogue
Before starting the project, Max and I knew the bare minimum of what we had to do to start this business and start selling products commercially. We had no idea how difficult it actually would be and the tasks we had to accomplish to get it done. Creating the website was much harder than expected, as I had never created a website before. The designs were easy for me to create, but often times the designs wouldn't appeal to Max or I would have to alter the designs to have them fit with our manufacturer. This semester helped me learn the basics of starting a business. I learned that it is crucial to have large amounts of start-up capital to successfully get a business up and running. Max and I ran into problems when we found out how much it costs to get the manufacturers to produce our clothes, and had to downsize the amount of clothing we were going to order. The advertisement turned out great, and initially I wanted to print the ad in prominent magazines around Bozeman, including Bomb Snow, Outdoor Bozeman, and the Bozeman Chronicle. Due to time and monetary constraints, I was unable unable to achieve this as I could not get in contact with newspaper and magazine companies, or had trouble with them following through with printing the ad. At first I thought I had failed with the Instagram as well, because we had no followers. But eventually things started snowballing, and people started following, liking, and commenting. We learned how important time management is, because of all the self made deadlines we failed to meet. We hope that our audience learns that starting a business is much more than producing goods and advertising them on the Internet and around town. People always want to create their own small business for fun, but don't realize the time, effort, and patience required to do so. Although Max and I ended up overwhelming ourselves with this project, learning that starting a business is no small undertaking, we are proud and happy with the final products. We created an clean, easy-to-use, enticing website portraying my designs and the limited quantity of physical products we ended up ordering. We hope to get orders for the items we do have, and will continue to accept custom orders for a portion of the summer. Even though we cannot foresee the future of Bear Trap Design Co., I still feel proud of the work I did and the amount that I learned this semester.