Updates

Habari, After a week of settling down, meetings and gaining a realistic insight of SRI, we have started with our project! During a meeting with Verah and George we discussed having an Open House at SRI. The idea behind the Open House is to show the locals what SRI does (and especially the carpentry workshop), find new apprentices and see what products the locals are willing to buy. At the moment…

In our last update we told you about the open house. This took place last Thursday 26th of November. In the morning we had to do some last minute shoppings (fresh meat, fresh vegetables etc.) and make SRI open house-proof. We ordered 50 chairs from the little shop across the street, set up the music installation and transformed our house to a showroom. The day started at 10:00, but as expexted…

Last week we showed some of our products at a local festival. We had our own stand and we even sold some products! It was a great way to create some positive awareness for the carpentry workshop.

Yesterday we did some market research. We went to Kibuye Market, this is the local market where people buy all their furniture. You could call it 'the Dutch Ikea'. Here we interviewed some carpenters and gained some information for our project. 

We have started a sales manager trial. Fabian will go to Kisumu, and search for new customers. In the first week it has already showed some positive results. He has found 5 new customers who are willing to place orders in the amounts of 10-13 units. These orders are yet to be confirmed. 

We have provided all the carpenters of SRI with new work clothes. Also SRI has a new gate and sign, which we also organized. We can already see a lot of improvements towards the awareness of SRI