For this week's task, Lord Siralan drags the Apprenti to the Royal Exchange, which, sadly, doesn't indicate that this task involves re-branding a member of the royal family or something, but that it has to do with luxury products. In this case, "designer home fragrance product," as Lord Siral elegantly puts it. He also says that the margins in the business are very good and the ingredients are cheap. So it's all about selling cheap tat at massively inflated prices to gullible idiots.
The teams have to make designer candles and reed defusers (no idea) and sell them to the trade and general public. The winners are the ones with the most profit at the end.
It's also time for a re-shuffle, so Steven, Daniel and Felipe are packed off to team Tenacity and Nurun, Lindsay, Bianca and Roisin are shoved into team Summit. Katie, who with her accent and glasses, looks like a deflated Sarah Millican, takes charge because she is obsessed with the smell of her own home. Or to put it in a way that sounds less perverse, buys a lot of this stuff. What was that about gullible morons?
Sarah Katie
Roisin takes charge of team Summit, because she's an accountant and this task is all about margins and figures. She says she likes the smell of fresh laundry and the beach. So wet towels?
The teams divide into a factory sub-team and a marketing sub-team. The latter go off to do some market research. The tenacity sub-team quickly discover that the market favours clean simple colours and if given the choice, they should use soy wax and not paraffin. Katie, meanwhile has decided to make bright yellow candles in paraffin wax. She decides to ignore the sub-teams research because she pretty much is the market for this kind of thing.
The Tenacity factory team then settle on green tea, lemon grass and aloe vera as a smell combination. They discuss names and reject Lemonise and Yellow Submarine, before settling on British Breeze because, as Nick Hewer points out, none of these fragrances are British.
Roisin, meanwhile, has stuck with the seaside theme and has come up with the name Beach Dreams. Oddly, in a room with a huge poster advertising fish and chips, which is both British and beachy. Have the teams missed a marketing opportunity here? Team Summit agrees on a plain white candle, in a square glass with a black box and a very simple blue and white striped design that actually looks reasonably high quality.
The Fish and Chips room
The marketing sub-teams are now sent to do some early day one pitching ahead of the heavy selling the following day. And Roisin undermines her luxury message by allowing them to sell at only £15 a candle. Katie thinks her team can get £35 for their bright yellow, ambiguously British product and tells Sarah to be quiet when she disagrees, or just because it's Sarah and telling her to be quiet is never a bad idea.
At the factory, Sanjay is doing the heavy maths and chemistry work while everyone else has a little snooze. Nurun and Lindsay pretty much admit that they can't count and are essentially useless. Karen Brady points out that Lord Siralan can't carry passengers which, given his ridiculously massive car seems a bit mean. Unfortunately, the candles look suspiciously like a glass of cold piss. But this is still the early stage, maybe they'll set nicely?
Piss Candles
Summit hold a meeting at a five start hotel with a massive man who has a normal-sized head or a normal-sized man with a tiny head. He seems to like the smell and will potential buy 25 candles and 25 reed defusers subject to the product not looking like piss.
Over at team Tenacity, Daniel is pitching to a country club. He is very keen to get them to buy 30 reed defusers, which seems a bit pointless as they only have 21 rooms. Daniel won't budge and is starting to sound a bit intense and creepy. Steven steps in and drops the quantity to 25 which leads to a quick deal, probably because the customers just want to get as far away from Daniel as possible. Outside, Daniel is angry at Steven for undermining his pitch, Steven thinks Daniel was being intimidating. Which is a mild way of saying 'positively unhinged'.
The next day team Summit's candle arrives and, fortunately, it no longer looks like piss having set bright yellow so that it now looks like a glass of custard. Katie says she would buy it, which. hopefully for her sake, says something about the market for this kind of thing. She wants to charge £30 a candle and won't go lower than £25. Meanwhile, Roisin plans to start selling her 'luxury' candle at £25 and go no lower than £15.
Custard Candles
But this pricing policy goes completely out of the window as soon as they hit the street. Roisin flogs 40 reed defusers to the first gift shop they see for only £8.50 each. Meanwhile, James is leading the sub-team at a local market and is flogging candles for anything he can get, offering two for £10 in some cases. He also gets in trouble with Karen for trying to claim the candles have a recommended retail price of £45 when they haven't been recommended for retail anywhere at any price.
Not that the low prices have helped Lindsay or Nuren. Nuren is wandering around half-heartedly trying to drum up some interest in the candles, but doesn't really seem to care if they are or not. Lindsay, on the other hand, has given up entirely and is hiding behind the stall. When questioned she just says that she doesn't have the knack for sales.
Over with team Tenacity and things are not going much better. Lauren is in charge and manages to get in an argument with Sarah, largely because Sarah doesn't like being given instructions of any kind. She claims Lauren is "so bossy", which suggests she doesn't quite understand how management works. The team stick to the high prices dictated by Kate, but still manage to make some sales. All except Sarah who can't make any and decides this is because the price is too high. She starts lobbying aggressively for price cuts. What was that about bossiness?
Anyone for a candle?
On the corporate side it's a mixed experience for both teams. Team Tenacity get off to a bad start. They meet with their country-house client who refuses to take any defusers where the label isn't straight. The team then waste time rummaging through boxes trying to find 25 defusers with straight labels. Having wasted plenty of time, they then head to a nightclub to flog the rest, presumably because it's too dark to see if the labels are straight or not.
Looking for straight labels
Team Summit make their appointment with the giant man at the hotel. He's surprisingly not disappointed by the candles, but can't buy any defusers because the team already flogged them to the gift shop and don't have any left. Roisin phones James to see if they can get more stock, but thanks to deep discounting the team are almost out. Roisin has one more appointment so gets James to pack up and bring their remaining stock. James exits at high speed, but can't stop himself from yelling "two for £10" on the way out.
Roisin almost manages to sell the two remaining defusers, but James vetoes it, saying he can get more. He then flogs the last of the team's candle stock and throws the defusers in for free without even being asked. James may have misunderstood the nature of the task. It's the customers, not the team, he's supposed to be swindling.
Anyone want to buy a table for a fiver?
Back in the boardroom, Lord Siral warns everyone that he's not interested in anyone claiming they can't sell, because he thinks it's easy and anyone can do it. Is this a hint of possible targets for firing? team Summit thinks Roisin did a good job as project manager and Lord Siral likes their candle. He thinks team Tenacity's candle looks like a bowl of custard and Sarah moans about the high prices. We can probably guess where this is going.
And so it does. Summit have a profit of £1569.32, but Tenacity have £1584.09. Tenacity are sent off to a spa, which gives the opportunity to be covered in funny coloured gunk while wearing swimsuits before all getting into a Jacuzzi that isn't big enough for them.
Roisin tries to defend herself by pointing out that they only lost by £15, but Lord Siral is having none of that. Team Tenacity also have lots of srock left over and if this was a real business they would be much better off. Of course if this was a real business they wouldn't have had to do everything in two days and they wouldn't have had free access to a candle factory.
Lord Siral seems particularly annoyed with James for casually ignoring the pricing policy and selling the candles for whatever he could get, which he calls panic selling. Not that Roisin has much of a defence here given that she sold off all her reed defusers for £8.50 each. James, insanely, claims that if Lord Siral had been in the same position he would have done the same thing. It's a brave or foolish person who tries to tell Lord Siralan Sugar what he would do, especially when you're telling him he would do something actively stupid.
At this point it looks like James his doomed herself, but Lord Siral, surprisingly, throws him a lifeline by turning his attention to Nurun and Lindsay, the latter of which only sold £12 worth of stuff. She's going to need a damn good defence to get out of this. But instead she pretty much agrees that she's crap, that she disappointed herself and that she isn't the person she thought she was when she came into the process. The whole thing is so sad that James has a moment of genuine feeling and reaches over to touch her shoulder. Could we be on the verge of the first Apprentice quitting? Lord Siral can't have that, he accuses Lindsay of taking someone else's seat and she's fired. Though she does get a "with regret," which is very rare in week 3.
With Lindsay gone things are looking better for Nurun. One person has been fired for being lacklustre and crap, is Lord Siral really going to go for two? Nevertheless, Roisin brings back Nurun and James into the boardroom.
Lord Siralan thinks James has some potential but needs polish. Though he doesn't specify whether he should drink it or rub it over himself. Unfortunately one of James' unpolished elements is a total inability to shut up. He keeps interrupting and decides to compare himself to Lord Siral again. Because it worked so very well the first time
Nick believes that Roisin lacks command, given that James ignored her. But given that he's ignoring Lord Siral I'm not sure lack of command is the problem. But Lord Siral has moved onto Nurun who he thinks did badly as Project Manager last week, winning more because the other team were eevrn worse. He thinks she doesn't have the ability to expand her business. She tried to defend herself, but Lord Siral just looks bored.
Unfortunately, Nurun's quiet incompetence is less entertaining than James' loud incompetence and so Nurun is fired. Though James is given special instructions to shut up and listen, though even then he can't quite bring himself to not interrupt.
After the show is over, we discover on 'You're Fired' that Lindsay is a perfectly normal person who grew her swimming academy business from ten students to over three hundred, and that Nurun had an idea for a wedding planning business for asian weddings that sounded like it might actually work. All of which sadly demonstrates that forcing people to perform a series of insane tasks and shout justifications for why it went wrong across a table may not actually be the best way to choose a business partner.
NEXT TIME: The Apprenti try to launch and online video channel. Queue lots of green screen, violent chefs and Ella-Jade being called offensive.
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