Mills Advertising

THE first weeks of university life can be pretty daunting for most students. New home, new town, new friends - and, in most cases, a new life away from home.

Student Survival Stuff, a range of starter packs designed specifically for first-time students, aims to make the difficult transition from home life to living on their own as smooth and stress-free as possible.

The packs - for the kitchen, the bathroom and the bedroom - provide students with basic essentials they need to kit out their student accommodation and survive the first days and weeks of university life.

They are delivered to their student accommodation by courier to coincide with their arrival.

The venture is the brainchild of Cheryl Barber, who operates student accommodation in the Middlesbrough and Stockton area.

“The packs are designed to get university life off to the best start possible,” says Cheryl. “I’ve lost count of the number of times students in our accommodation have asked, ‘Where can I get a duvet?’ or ‘I wish I’d remembered a toaster.’

“There are 1.8m students in the UK, 78% of whom are undergraduates and 87% of those move away from home to university. And the reality is, most of them arrive excited and eager, but ill-prepared for university life. If we can get them off to a good start, this will set the tone for the rest of that critical first year.”

Student Survival Stuff offers various packs - for the kitchen, for the bedroom and for the bathroom - and come in bronze, silver and gold standards.

The silver kitchen pack includes such student essentials as a kettle and toaster and easily overlooked items such as washing-up liquid, bin bags and non-perishable foods such as teabags, coffee, biscuits - even a pot noodle is available in the survival pack. Packs start at £29.99, plus delivery up to the gold pack which includes four sets of crockery and cutlery and adds such luxuries as a low-fat grill and a smoothie-maker.

“It’s about convenience. Of course, any student could traipse around supermarkets and soft furnishing shops and buy the same items, but how many students have the time or inclination to do that,” says Cheryl, whose property development company Campus Lifestyle opened its first student accommodation building in 1996.

“We’re offering the service to students, but the reality may be that parents will be our biggest customers - I’m sure the thought of making their child’s first few days at university a little more pain-free as possible will be very tempting.”

“We’ve spoken to quite a few parents and, to a person, they think it’s a great service. It’s one of those business ideas where you think, ‘Why hasn’t someone already thought about doing this?’”

The business partners have also done fairly extensive marketing among their resident student population.

A survey of students in Teesside House, Campus Lifestyle’s flagship accommodation building in Middlesbrough town centre, convinced the business partners the venture could succeed. The students were midway through their first years so had recently experienced the transition from home life to university life. Of the 100 surveyed, 84 said the packs would be useful.

But the acid test came when the bedroom pack was tested on a group of 40 French students starting a course at Teesside University - 36 bought bedrooms packs, meaning they didn’t have to transport sheets, pillows, duvets, etc. across the channel or start shopping for them when they arrived.

“We source our products based on price, and quality and safety standards,” says Cheryl. “We have settled on about a dozen wholesale suppliers, all UK-based, but in the long-term it is likely we will import direct from manufacturers.”

Student Survival Stuff is looking urgently at sites for a warehouse in the Teesside area and expects to employ more people very quickly.

“Once we get the warehouse, we’ll need a warehouse manager and more people to make up the packs. Then we’ll need more people to handle orders, as well as website managers and marketing staff, and all quite quickly.”

“It’s an online business, so it’s accessible anywhere in the world, but the reality is that our courier service will be limited to mainland Britain and we are determined that we will learn to walk before we run, so while the service from day one will be available to anyone anywhere in the UK, we will be marketing the concept in stages, focusing initially on the five North-East university centres of Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham, Teesside and York, but also centres such as London, Manchester and Nottingham, and building from there.”

The business partners hope Student Survival Stuff will ultimately become a conduit for all manner of student shopping. Plans are afoot to supply telephones, computers and electrical goods, while a stationery pack is likely to be the next to be introduced.

“We’re keeping it simple to begin with, but eventually students will be able to pick and mix the contents of their packs, for instance, adding things in and taking others out,” says Cheryl. “We are also looking beyond the obvious. We are keen on the idea of a survival pack for music festivals, based around the basic essentials of a tent and sleeping bag, with a few added extras.”

For more information, go to www.studentsurvivalstuff.com

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