Prototyping & Production

The production side of the business is fairly straightforward. All you need to do to make things run smoothly is to do the following things:

1) Make sure everyone is trained. EVERYONE. Our business required sewing skills, and in the first few weeks, we had to train several people on the sewing machine. Training will make production quicker, and also means that if one person who normally works on production is unable to work for some reason, someone else can pick up the slack. For example, our head of production was out of town for five days, but since we had several SofTee members trained on the sewing machine, they could spread the extra work out amongst themselves and not be overloaded.

2) Have some sort of quality control. Your results need to be consistent and of high quality. The easiest way to do this is to have one person check all products before they are sent out to customers. That way, you know everything is being held to the same standard. In our business, the head of Production was also in charge of quality control. Since many of our team members were not familiar with the sewing machine, quality had to make sure the seams were all done well. Quality control also had to make sure all the pillows were stuffed equally.

3) Prototype your products. We ended up changing both our pillow and our backpack after seeing the prototype. We changed how much stuffing was going to be in the pillow, and we changed the orientation of the backpack (originally, the t-shirt design was upside-down). Also, when you start prototyping your product, if you plan to show it to anyone outside your group, make sure it looks good. Chances are, anyone you show it to is a potential customer, and even if you tell them what changes the final product will have, a visual has far more impact on whether they’ll buy one or not. We ran into this with our backpack product. We had a prototype with us when we sold at lunch, but the strings were made of yarn and the shirt was upside down. Even though we explained what changes we were making, no one bought one until we had a final backpack to demo. We sold three in the week after we had a final backpack to demo, whereas before we had sold none.

4) Now for the actual production process: before you start, lay out exactly what steps will be involved in making you product. Then, keep track of how long each step takes. This way, when you divide up the tasks, no one gets overloaded. Our particular product had the following steps: sew three seams, stuff the shirt, and sew the final seam. It took about twenty minutes to sew each shirt: five for the first three seams on the sewing machine, five to stuff it, and ten to sew the collar by hand. Initially, we were going to sew the collar on the sewing machine, but it simply did not look good. Thus we ended up dividing the work by having one person stuff and sew the three seams, and another person sew the collar. Keeping track of time the time each shirt takes to make also helps the professors have an idea of how much time you’re putting in outside of class.

5) Communicate with marketing and your CFO. This is really important, because if you have a new product in the works, marketing needs to know so they can do their job. We released a new product, a backpack, but since marketing did not really have a chance to put up advertisements about it, customer recognition was very low. You should also be in constant contact with you CFO. They will be able to keep better records if they know how much supply is used, how many products are made, and when orders are completed. We had a few weeks where different people thought we had different amounts of stuffing, and we ran out. This stalled production for a few days. Also, near the beginning, production was not telling the CFO when orders were filled, so the financial sheet was incorrect.


We do not guarantee that you will not run into issues, but if you remember these guidelines, you will avoid a lot of problems. Not all of these steps apply to a service based business, but most of them are applicable.