Finishing Up

It's our final update for the whole project, and we have some great news to report!
Our event was a success, and we happily were able to collect TONS of costumes to donate. There were around 25 girls who came and participated. We taught a fun dance to the girls, who each brought a gently used costume for admission to the event. While the main focus of the event was the costumes, we introduced a little friendly competition to make it more enticing for the participants and selected one dancer to win a free private lesson. Each girl danced so hard that it was difficult to choose! We were very proud and glad that they were able to get a good experience out of something we worked very hard on.
We are currently in contact with another amazing organization that has expressed interest in receiving our costumes. Traveling Tutus is a charity organization located in Florida that accepts dance costumes from around the world and redistributes them to children in need, ranging anywhere from the United States to more diverse locations such as Haiti and Uganda. We spoke with the founder, and she helped us make a plan to ship our costumes to her in Florida, where she will then repackage and send them to children.
We had such an amazing experience with this project and are very proud of what we've accomplished.

Our amazing dancers performing the combo they learned.

Update: Our Event

Hey there! This is an update on our 20 Time. Right now, we are focused on managing our upcoming event at the local dance studio. The date is set for this Saturday, but we aren't sure if that will work still. Most of the kids are on spring break this week so nobody may show up. That would be a bummer. We are nervous about planning but looking forward to it. So far, we've planned some activities we're going to do, passed out the flyers, and collected some dance costumes. We decided to expand from just costumes to all dancewear in general, such as leotards, tights, and accessories.
The biggest thing we are worried about is attendance. Right now, we only targeted the kids and asked them to come. But you know kids, they can very easily forget about the event or forget to bring costumes. We may need to send an email to the parents of the studio. This is more intimidating than we previously anticipated.

Update: Our Instagram

Hey, all! Today, we created an Instagram page for our budding business, which we have appropriately named @5678forall. Please give us a follow. On this page, we plan to post pictures of our available costumes for sale and invite our followers to inquire on said costumes. In addition, we encourage them to donate any old costumes to us in exchange for an additional discount.

From this point, we will begin to advertise our Instagram boutique. We will share this idea with our friends, young dance students, and create flyers to put up around town in local stores. Katrina and I hope to increase our presence on social media, and further extend the word, hoping to reach a wider audience. In addition, we will encourage people to donate their costumes. We will start by donating our own costumes and asking our friends to do the same. Eventually, we hope to gain a large enough following and to have our followers donate some of their own costumes as well.

Additionally, we have decided to organize an event to spread awareness of our project and collect costumes as well as to provide young kids with a fun, dance-filled day. So far, we have created a flyer and reserved a date in the dance studio. When we pitched our idea to young dancers, there was an overwhelmingly positive response.

Ready to dance with us? Follow us on Twitter and Instagram... @5678forall

Just Getting Started...

Hi, all! This is our 20% Time project for Mr. Orre's Anatomy class. 20% Time is a self-regulated and researched project geared towards our own interests. We spend approximately 20% of our class time, which ends up being around 45 minutes a week, developing a project of our own choice. For us, this is a company we like to call, "5678 For All." With this project, we are aiming to answer the essential question: How can we create something that benefits underprivileged communities while at the same time emphasizes the importance of the arts, especially dance. Our project, which expands upon an idea we had in our AP Government and Economics classes, will be to create a platform for people to donate and purchase repurposed costumes at an extremely reduced rate. We chose this as we know firsthand the excessive costs of customized costumes and uniforms. Don't sacrifice quality because of price; get beautiful custom costumes from us! This project allows us to answer our essential question, as we are not only creating an avenue for dancers, actors, etc. from underprivileged communities to buy gorgeous costumes and feel confident on stage, but also making these arts more easily accessible. We hope to set up an "Instagram Boutique" account, where we will utilize the ever-growing social media platform to post pictures of our supply and allow people to inquire and purchase them through the account's Direct Messaging feature. We will regularly update our blog with facts and figures of our sales/follower count/what we've been doing. We hope to increase exposure and get the word out that this is a new option. Moving forward, we will create the Instagram page, collect costumes, and begin to clean and post said costumes. We can't wait to see where this project takes us! Love, Hayley and Katrina