Toolroom Skills Challenge

I haven't written a blog post in ages! Sorry about that guys, I've been busy with a skills challenge and started to pack to move house, so I thought I'd write a quick blog on the skills challenge, cause it's the most interesting thing thats happened to me in the past few weeks.

Every year at school, we have something called a 'Skills Challenge' for the year 12's, at the end of June, after all the exams. Every year 12 student is brought in during the holidays, and get split into seven teams of eight or nine students. Each team is then given a challenge by a local company to fix, this challenge isn't something random, it's usually a problem that the company would face during the year at some point. Be that figuring out how to get students involved in a running club, or getting young people into work, anything like that. Most students dread it, and just wish they could stay at home to enjoy their holidays. Admittedly, I was one of those people, but, I was proved wrong in the end.

The first day, we were introduced to our 'employers' if you will, and it turned out to be pretty cool. My group were hired by Toolroom Records, a dance record company that resides in my town. They aren't as big as Ministry Of Sound or anything like that, but they do sell to over one hundred countries, and turned over 1.2 million last year, which isn't bad for a small record label that hires twenty people in the middle of Maidstone.

We were given the challenge of designing and marketing a dance compilation album. Of course, my whole group almost literally jumped into action, getting so excited over this. We were making a dance album, we had twenty grand to spend on marketing too. Basically, we were kids in a toy store. But, it didn't mean we didn't take things seriously. By day two, we almost had an entire album planned out. We were conducting research into the three names we'd chosen (Decade, Fusion, Transition) an album concept (celebrating Toolroom's 10th year in business, mixing old and new music together in the album) and a possible idea for an album cover (Toolroom's house colours melding together like paint mixing).

Eventually, we decided on using the name Fusion, as we were fusing two ages of music, to bring older dance tracks to a newer audience, as our target market was sixteen to eighteen year olds. Then, we had to decide on how we were going to market it, in the most interesting ways possible. So, we came up with the ideas of doing a flash mob, and a silent disco. Both would be filmed and put on YouTube, in the hope they would become viral among the target market, so we could advertise our album to a huge market in a quick space of time. We also went with the traditional YouTube advert, twitter promotion, billboard adverts, and things like this.

Toolroom really liked all of our ideas, and at the end of our two weeks, we had an album and a marketing plan, and as we presented it to a group of judges, we got through to the final! We came third in the end, but, we had a great time in the end, and learnt a lot about the world of dance music, something we hadn't really been involved in before. Toolroom, thanks for the opportunity!
Oh, here's a picture of our final product if you're interested: