Visual Merchandising/School Store
Megan Le and Makayla Schmierer
Visual Merchandising / School Store is a new business class is being introduced to Tigard High this year. The Tigard Cage, which had been run by leadership in the past, will now be run by students in this class. Any student who has taken intro to business and marketing, sales and promotion, or retail management, which are prerequisites for the class, would be a perfect fit for the new student store.
“For the first time in 20 years, it’ll be just run by the students in the class, it won’t be shared with concessions, 100 percent student organized. In our opinion, the student store was an opportunity to give kids more of a real life experience with what it would be to run a retail space,” Business teacher Sam Caliva said. “We’re trying to do a mini walk-in store next year, kids are going to be fully in charge of figuring out what products students are asking for, so we’d have to do a little market research. They’re gonna be in charge of what kind of products they want to bring in and order and how much it costs them and what they’re price markups are going to be.”
Students will be in charge of inventory control, paying bills, and putting on promotional campaigns to pull as many students as possible into the store. They’ll also be able to create posters, make announcements and commercials, and do research to figure out what products students would like to be sold in the store such as: clothes, food, school supplies, or spirit gear.
“You guys have more insight into what kids want than we do. That’s what’s fun about having you guys going out and researching it because there could be a product out there that we have no clue kids are wanting and you guys could support that,” Sue Suttich said. “Eventually my goal is to purchase a t-shirt making machine so we can do it ourselves. And that way we could pull in design students or work with the design class. We could do t-shirts for all the sports teams and leadership people and all that and it would all be in house. That’s the eventual five year plan.”