They talked about selling them to people who go camping and happen to be at the festival. Why? It's not a Trade Show. If you did want one (Heaven forbid) you wouldn't buy it there. You'd wait till you got home and buy one online for less.

And if anyone actually wanted to buy one (!!) they'd need washing powder which they weren't selling.

For us, when camping, space is at a premium. Go to a camping shop and you'll see that you can buy a whole load of junk, including a kitchen sink (it folds up). Yes, really. We make a point of taking what we need and no more. If anyone saw you with a washing machine, they'd laugh. We take enough clothes to last the trip. If I had to wash something, I'd hand wash. As a last resort, I'd go to a launderette (never have had to). The last thing I would do is buy a gimmick to be stored for 51 weeks of the year.

I found it funny. Far, far funnier than swearing.

We just have a different sense of humour.

Spot on. I didn't realise. Maybe you should apply (or just take the credit)...

... just you wait till the final (no, it's not a spoiler. I've no idea what happens). I've been saying for a while that he could win if he has a good business plan up his heavily embroidered sleeve. I reckon he may (???) have designed the clothes he wears in which case he's pulled off a stunt - free advertising on an advertising-free channel, week after week.

And Patrick has a business that is up & running, which could generate a good income. It stands to earn a lot more than Lucy's cake business which is surely a cottage industry and can never break out of that. And I suspect that most contestants just have ideas for a business, not one that is up & running like Patrick's.

I'm also thinking that the BBC might like the idea of giving the prize to someone so different from previous winners.

I could be wrong - just a guess.

Did I imagine it or was Patrick selling the umbrellas at cost? I'm pretty sure I heard him accept £35 for them from a couple of people and thought that was what they paid for them as well.

Without checking. Neither team can have sold much given their mark ups and how little profit there was. . The mark up on the umbrellas was higher, if I recall, than on the onesies. Maria managed to sell several of the toilets and the mark up on them was 40-60% on the sales I think we saw. If the winning gap was small, and the umbrellas equalled the onesies, Maria could have made enough with 4-5 toilet sales Patrick may have needed to sell fewer items to equal Lucy and we may have seen Maria doing enough to bring in the difference..

There is of course a famous example of this in the real business world; the Hoover "free flights" fiasco. Some bright spark had the idea of giving away free flights with each Hoover product to increase sales. It certainly did increase sales, but the cost of providing the flights was more than they were selling the product for, so the more products they sold the more money they lost. I still can't credit that a major business could have blundered into that.

I'd like to thank you for all the explanations you've given on this thread, as they've been very interesting as well as informative.

In all honesty, I don't see how they could give the winner such a dreadful edit. Sugar would look like an idiot if Patrick won.

That is why I am certain Team Patrick/Maria will lose next week.

They both made so little profit - £200 ish, over the course of a day, with four people on each team... there was only £33 in it IRRC. To be fair all of them should have come back to the boardroom - nobody 'won' - it was two sets of absolute disasters.

The only smart thing anyone did was Ashleigh chose to do her market research in Camden, which was roughly the right place. While Andrew did his in a shopping centre, and then went round a festival in a suit... yet you could tell Sugar was still really reluctant to fire him, as he was last week - because he reminds the mad old Thunderbirds puppet of himself (because he''s not a posh girl like some others he fires, basically)

I think that should be the system for the semi-finals anyway, regardless of how well each team do. It would give Sugar a chance to put all the best candidates through to the final.

Am i the only one who thought that ALL of the items were overpriced?

£18 for facepaints, £40 for a onesie, £70 for an umbrella???? and sorry but who on earth would want facepaints at a festival - were there really that many kids there to warrant putting in an item just for them??

If I were at a festival - Id be taking as much of what I needed with me to avoid paying the inevitable rip off prices charged by the on site vendors.... and that included enough clothes so i wouldn't need to wash (and dry!) clothes while I was away. The only things I'd want to buy were souvenirs like hats/ tshirts etc

They were overpriced but so is everything at festivals. Karren pointed out that they could buy in bulk, drive prices down and be able to afford to sell at a lower price.

Onesies appeal to festival crowds and I think face paint would have sold well - you see a lot of kids and adults getting painted up at festivals. The vegan angle would have been good for WOMAD. I imagine the mark up was also already pretty good.

Based on my own experience I couldn't see many people wanting to buy the portable toilets or the washing machine, I was baffled that they thought they would be good picks. Andrew kept going on about 'glamping', is labouring over a portable washing machine particularly glamorous?

I cant think who the washing machine could appeal to to be honest, if you go away on holiday, camping or otherwise, you take enough clean clothes to cover the trip, if you dont have room for a bigger suitcase then you definately dont have room for a portable washing machine!

The toilet one I could see maybe for wild campers and/or Hikers, (does it fold down, I've forgotten!) they could carry it flat with their supply of bags, as many have to poo into a hole and bury it, so the camo. toilet would be a luxury!.

The whole task seemed to be a bit of a disaster.
Maybe someone could help to give me insight but are they allowed to research where they are going and who will be there?
Surely they'd have chosen different products in that case? Although from what I could see the products they had to choose from weren't great.
I'm with those who think Patrick could well surprise in the final . . . or he may continue as he has been all series, pretty unremarkable.

They did research it - Ashleigh and Andrew were shown to be researching it. Although Andrew couldn't find anyone who wanted to talk to him, and Ashleigh's research was fairly useless as her team had made up their minds before she told them what she'd found out.

I knew about market research but I was just wondering if they were allowed to research the festival itself like google it or find out what the demographic was. Now you mention it all of the people Ashleigh was speaking to did seem to be a bit older so I guess they must've known the demographic at least.

Ooh, I'm not sure... I think that was one reason that Steven was fired though. It appeared that he was the only one of the six who went to festivals, so he should have known what would sell.

I watched it again last night and Stephen said, after the news that his team had lost, "I still think that the washing machine is the best product in the line up". (I assume that they didn't change the sequence in the editing).

That's a quote, not a vague recollection of what he said.

So it was even worse than you said - he couldn't see the error of his ways.

(But let's not forget that the cartoon cookbook was his idea too).

He deserved to be fired on the basis of that statement alone shocking product.

Tom was consistently hopeless. The only difference was that although Tom's ability to design anything else was questionable after tasks, his ability to design nail files wasn't challenged. Lord Sugar has explicitly criticised Patrick's fashion design ability in week one. However, the last task is about fashion, so that might get nullified or confimed if he does well/fails again.

or they just took her somewhere there was a lot of older people and she asked anyone there??

He wasn't that bad, he was a favourite to win from the early weeks, I remember my friends discussing him as a contender from quite early on.

He was unlucky to be in so many losing teams. I think it's telling that he was on the losing team for the first five weeks, but was not brought back into the boardroom for any of them. In my opinion, he was better than people like Jim, Natasha, Melody and Zoe.

Having said that, I do think Helen or Susan would have made a better winner.

That's entirely possible. I'm not an expert, but I know land is a tricky thing to value because it is an asset with essentially an infinite lifespan. And it's one whose market value can go up or down, which makes 'fair' valuation very tricky.


Absolutely spot on. Both teams' sales were pretty pathetic in the final analysis, not least because it is clear from the numbers that a lot of their sales must have been achieved late in the day at heavily slashed prices.

You're quite right. I assume that the way tasks are accounted for to give us a result bend the accepted rules of management accounting somewhat, though - e.g. all costs are taken immediately in tasks which are judged on "profit".