Baader is a company that was set up by a group of young Emirati university students who have set up a social enterprise that has taught them valuable lessons in business and entrepreneurship. Tempo caught up with the CEO of Bader Noha Al Yafei.
Tempo: What and who is Baader?
Noha: Baader is a team of seven female students from HCT Abu Dhabi Women’s College: we are myself Noha Al-Yafei as well as Taiba Al-Nuaimi, Shaikha Al-Ajami, Mouza Al-Kaili, Asma Ismael, Fatima Ali and Ayesha Al-Hemairi.
We joined the INJAZ Company Program, which is a global partnership affiliated with Junior Achievement, to experience entrepreneurship. Our business is called Baader, and its aim is to collect used toys from individuals, fix them up and resell them to society. The purpose of Baader is to spread awareness among people in the habit of throwing unneeded toys that these items can be reused. At Baader we are ready to collect them and make them available to poor children. This helps the community and benefits the environment. We hope that parents will think about Baader to share their unneeded toys so that we can put them to good use. Our mission is to collect a maximum amount of games and toys that are in good condition to offer customers a good quality of used games at affordable prices.
From (L-R): Teeba Nasser, Asma Ismail, Noha Alyafei, Moza Humaid, Fatima Ali
Tempo: What are the challenges that you are facing?
Noha: The obvious concern is whether the customers are willing to buy a used toy in a country that has been ranked with the fifth highest GDP per capita; therefore, we narrowed our target market segment. Secondly, as we are students in our graduating year, the issue of time management is critical. It has been a great opportunity for the team to face real work situations in the private sector in term of the management, communication, production etc, and we recognize that the equation in business is simple: working hard equals profit gain.
Tempo: Where do you sell your toys and what’s the average price of an item?
Noha: Baader has to date sold in a tent on Abu Dhabi Corniche, where the foot traffic has been good. The average selling price is Dh 10 – 15, where we budgeted 50% of the our sales revenue to the charity
Tempo: Do you have process for collecting the toys?
Noha: Toys are collected in two ways: the first is a direct donation of unneeded toys. The second is to enable anyone who wants to sell his expensive toy or game to do it through us. We created specific receipt for this kind of segment to assure that he will receive his payment once the game is sold at our point of sale.
Once the toys reach Baader we classify each item according to the quality and the amount of repairs that it needs. Items are repaired either by the Baader team or through other specialized workshops. Those that cannot be sold are disassembled and used for their spare parts. Unusable plastics are donated to the Sara Plastic Factory to recycle them to produce plastic gallons for ADNOC.
Tempo: So how business been so far?
Noha: Baader almost operated for four weeks with an average daily two sale hours, for a total of 24 hours, and we managed to generate Dh 20,000. In other words we generated AED 833 per hour. By observing the potential demand in the market we figured out that if the business is operating daily eight hours only; we could potentially generate Dh 160,000 monthly.
Tempo: So what are your future plans?
Noha: We are thinking of expanding Baader by leasing a workshop, increasing staff and getting some machines in order to increase the sales volume and build up a brand name in the market. All this would be done by several steps, such as hiring technical staff to manage the electronic games and does the machinery work. Another plan is to provide packaging machines to improve our business image. Another idea that we are thinking of is to use a re-cycling machine to recycle some of the plastic parts so we can design replacement parts for the damaged toys that we have. In terms of social responsibility we hope to donate toys to refugee children in other countries.
Tempo: Would you like to say something to the readers?
Noha: We encourage young people to get involved, by setting by their own business or volunteering. We urge them to try to think of something that would benefit them, the environment and society as well. This kind of work can also help develop their confidence, communication and time management skills.
