NuView

While completing their third year of science at university, Erika and Kurtis invented a new
contact-lens colouring process they named NuView. They did routine market studies which found
that 80% of those surveyed wanted to try NuView. Erika and Kurtis developed a business plan,
obtained several new business start-up grants, and had their product medically tested, approved and
registered.
One bottle of NuView contained enough solution for three months of normal contact lens use. As a
result of consumer suggestions, NuView kept adding new colours and buyers could now choose
from five different ones (red, green, blue, orange, and brown). To change eye colour a person would
simply add two drops of NuView to each contact lens, wait five seconds, and the colour would last
for 20 hours.
With their $200,000 start-up grants, Erika and Kurtis had sufficient capital to lease a small plant, do
some preliminary newspaper advertising, purchase the required manufacturing equipment, and hire
a full-time production supervisor and a part-time office assistant. They also paid to have a company
Web site built from which products could be ordered and the company marketed.
To date, about 10 percent of sales occurred on NuView's Web site. However, in the most recent
company survey, Kurtis found that 95% of the students contacted said they would prefer ordering
NuView over the Internet.
With their equipment and staff, they estimated they could produce up to 1000 bottles of NuView
per eight-hour production shift. Production output ranged between 250 - 550 bottles and these
targets were set by Erika during monthly production meetings regardless of actual sales or
marketing research results. Recently, the production supervisor mentioned that there were
increasing amounts of unshipped retailer returned NuView stacked in cartons throughout the plant
and that he had now rearranged the production equipment several times to make room.
Each bottle cost $4.00 to produce and was sold to retailers for $10.00 who in turn sold it to
consumers for $20.00, which was also the price someone would by NuView for from the company
Web site. During a routine Internet search, Erika discovered a news item about contact lens
colouring tablets being developed by a leading contact lens manufacturer that was planning to give
away the new tablets as a promotion when the product was launched next year.
With this new information, the staff decided they needed to make some decisions as how to best
manage, market and manufacture NuView.
Each of the following sentences is either 1) strength, 2) weakness, 3) opportunity, 4) threat or 5)
a fact (i.e. anything else). Determine the type of each sentence.

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