20A- Growing Your Social Capital

Domain expert: John F.

John is a manager at R.W. Rogers Company Inc. This company specializes in making accessories for stores, including display accessories and accessories for customers of the stores to use. R.W. started out as just a company that created different shopping carts for the Midwest and has expanded greatly since it opened. It was a bit hard to find John. I first had to google “shopping cart producers”, the company came up and then I had to explore through their website. The contact tab on the website was not very helpful, so I checked to see if the company had a Facebook. Through the Facebook, I was able to find a post that featured John. I contacted him by going through the websites contact form and requested for my note to be sent to him. I expect for him to be able to give me some insight on how to be innovative with shopping carts and accessories for stores. Having John in my network will allow for me to build a better understanding of cart and accessory manufacturing and ways to be creative with it.

Market expert: Nick C.

Nick works at Tagwear in Tampa. Tagwear is a company that sells promotional products like reusable bags, drinkware, banners, signs, and more. I found Nick through a local search on companies who sell reusable bags. I decided to search this because I figured companies like this target audience is retail and grocery stores like me. Their purpose is to reduce the use of plastic bags and implement the use of reusable bags therefore, a big buyer for them would be stores like Publix and Walmart which are stores that I can produce carts for. I expect Nick to offer feedback on my idea and give me good tips on how I can market to the customers properly. Having Nick in my network is very beneficial because he may have great insight on the customers, I am wanting to sell my system to.

Supplier: Publix manufacturing site

I went through the contact portal to see if I can speak to a person of authority in the Publix manufacturing site. Through research, I found that Publix creates their own carts. Publix has decided to manufacture their own carts because they wanted them to be a certain style to be of best use for their customers and make the shopping experience a pleasure. This would be a competitor for me because I would need to produce shopping carts for some stores. This would be a beneficial network for me in that I will be able to learn more about creating a product in an efficient way.

Reflection: Before this exercise I was very intimidated to network. Through this assignment, I realized how crucial networking is and how it is used for the purpose of supporting each other. This experience definitely differed from my past experiences in that I had to reach out through writing rather than see someone in person. Also, it was the first time I networked for something that wasn’t related to getting an internship or job.