FLIE RINGS

Executive Summary

Description of the Company

FLIE, LLC is a Provo-based start-up that focuses on millennial based fashion. While the eventual goal of the company was to expand into other fashion accessories that could be sold at big retailers such as PacSun and Tilly’s, the founder wanted to find a fashion accessory that the target market could quickly embrace and cause future brand awareness. The owner decided that fashion customized aluminum rings the right niche to launch FLIE into young fashion retail.

A Kickstarter was launched, more than 400 sales were made, and more than $10,000 was collected. After survey information for all the backers of the Kickstarter were collected, Ty needed to start production for the new rings. Several problems arose as the production process started. First problem: ring sizing is very difficult without a first-hand experience, so the customers are constantly changing the order before the production process could be solidified. Second problem: with seven different colors, sixteen different sizes, and two different ring shapes, FLIE has to deal with 224 unique inventory variety. To complicate the process, the batch process of manufacturing requires two separate manufacturing process: molding and anodizing. The molding requires the production plain uncolored aluminum rings of 16 different sizes, and the anodizing process requires 7 separate batches of different colors.

Solution

The solution used in this Visual Basics Application (VBA) project is to create an easy to use editor for the data base, and create a statistics spreadsheet that display the different preferences for color, sizes, and shape. The use of an editor is produced in order to address the first problem of the project which is the frequent changing of the user’s order. The editor allows the data base to stay consistent and uniform with the method and style of entering. Important data points such as color, size and shape is entered using a combo box instead of manually, in order to prevent discrepancies and misspelling of words.

The second problem is addressed through the statistical aggregator that I have design using VBA. Usually, a problem like this could be solved using a pivot table. Due to poor foresight, the survey author did not anticipate the future problems that he would face the way it is designed. First, the survey combined shape type and ring size into one column only separated a hyphen i.e. “THIN – 7.5”. In addition to the need for parsing data, the data is sorted by persons. Therefore, each purchase has a different number of rings of different sizes further making the data difficult to sort when rings are in four different columns. 

For more information regarding the Kickstarter and Video:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flie/flie-rings-colorful-anodized-aluminum-rings-for-li

For more information regarding FLIE LLC.:
https:// flielife.com/

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15f/mhsiung/FLIE_RING.xlsm
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15f/mhsiung/Flie_Ring_Writeup.pdf