Joy (2015)
The movie Joy is an interesting story about a girl, who, since she was a little girl created her own world about how she was going to do amazing things; a wonderful world where she wouldn’t need a prince to depend on, making reference to the traditional ideas that some movies, especially Disney movies portrayed. Since she was little, she is encouraged by her grandmother “Mimi”, she believes that Joy has great ideas and a different mindset from the rest of the family. Thus, she continuously motivates her to keep that spirit.
Joy grows up and her life does not go the way she expected. She is now a single mom, who has to shelter her ex-husband, Tony, in her basement. She also has to cope with her mom who spends all-day watching soap operas. If this wasn’t enough already, her grandma also lives in the same house and her father who divorced her mother appeared unexpectedly, seeking shelter because his new partner couldn’t put up with him anymore. Joy at his young age has to cope with all this trying to manage a house, take care of her children, helping her father with his business, and working in a job that evidently doesn’t care about what she is having to deal with. His father after being dumped by his ex-partner, starts dating via telephone and finds a new partner, Trudy, a rich Italian lady.
One day, Trudy invites all the family to spend the day in her yacht. The only condition she asks to all the guests is to not bring wine because the floor on the yacht is expensive and can be stained with red wine. They bring red wine anyway and after a fun evening they spilled the wine on the floor, Joy tries to clean it up but doing this she cuts her hands with the pieces of the glasses on the floor. They go back home but Joy is so drunk that she falls asleep on the stairway, and she dreams about the life that always imagined since she was little and also about an idea that would revolutionize the house cleaning industry, the automatic mop. She wakes up and immediately starts drawing what she saw in her dream.
Joy proposes this idea to her sister, father, and Trudy so they can invest money and time to start making a mop prototype, nevertheless none of them understand nor like joy’s idea. So, Joy starts creating her own prototype and shows it to her family. Now, with a prototype, they understand better what Joy is trying to do. Then, Joy tries to convince Trudy to invest in a small business with her, but Trudy doesn’t agree very easily, she asks Joy 4 questions that were the pillars of business that her husband used to do business. Joy answers the 4 questions and convinces Trudy to invest with her. They find a manufacturer to produce Joy’s mop in a larger scale and they’re supposed to be the cheapest manufacturer in the country.
At the beginning of her business, she couldn’t make any successful sale, because it was hard to enter the market and to advertise her product, since her mop was more expensive than the other ones. However, Tony remembers that he has a friend that works for the QVC company and Joy meets Neil Walker, who is an executive at QVC. Joy has to pitch her new product to all the executives of QVC and doesn’t do it very well, but Neil gives her a second chance. Although, he tells her that new products are hard to sell but he sees something different in Joy and believes in her. So, he asks Joy if she is capable of manufacturing 50,000 units to which Joy replies yes. Then, the first try in which QVC tries to market Joy’s mop on TV wasn’t very successful. The salesperson didn’t like Joy much, so he tries to boycott her by not using her product the way it should be used. Then, Joy calls Neil and ask him to give her another opportunity, but this time she wants to be the one marketing her product.
She was a total success, she was able to sell her product through TV, although with some help of her best friend. Joy’s business was making a lot of sales, but she wasn’t making any profit, even more because Joy’s sister was trying to boycott her as well. She was paying more to produce the mops and paying royalties to the manufacturer. She tries to stop her and decides to travel to California where the manufacturer is located. She goes to see why the production cost has increased so much and to ask her money back of the royalties.
When in the manufacturer Joy’s realizes that they have copied her designs and patented them. She explodes and tries to sue them for stealing her designs. However, Trudy’s lawyer advises that there’s nothing to do, that she needs to declare bankruptcy to avoid losing all she has. After spending all night reviewing the legal paperwork, Joy’s realizes there are some discrepancies with the manufacturer company story and discovers it is a fraud. She travels to Dallas to see the owner of the manufacturer, Derek, and reveals all the fraud. Joy forces him to pay a refund for the overcharges and pay damages, he agrees. At the end, Joy has a huge company thanks to the more than 100 patents she created. She is a benevolent businessperson that helps and support new inventors.
This is an interesting film because in about 2 hours it summarizes what most entrepreneurs encounter in reality when they launch their business. There are many lessons to learn from this film, like how difficult it is to introduce a new item to a market, how difficult is to market a product, how risky is to start a business and similarly how much an entrepreneur must believe in his or her product to make it a success. There are certain parts of the movie that stood out to me, for example, when Joy asks Trudy for funding for her business and Trudy asks Joy the 4 questions, which were the questions that Trudy’s husband used to ask to any person who wanted to do business with him. These questions were answer very securely by Joy and Trudy made the decision of investing in Joy’s business.
In the Joy movie we can see how entrepreneurship is present in Joy’s mindset since she was little, however, only her grandmother believed that she could achieve something with this mindset. The rest of her family didn’t believe that becoming an entrepreneur was the right path to choose. This reflects how society sees entrepreneurship like, typically people don’t think is a safe path to go, nevertheless, how successful someone will be, depends on the determination and resiliency of that person. For example, in the movie we can see how many times Joy received negative comments or failed miserably since she had her idea about the miracle mop; her family didn’t believe in her idea at the beginning, then she couldn’t sell any of her mops, and when she had great opportunities to sell her product, these opportunities were ruined by other people. As a matter of fact, one impactful phrase that stayed in my head about opportunities, it’s almost at the end of the movie in Joy’s last and biggest ‘failure’, when she says, >The world doesn’t give you opportunities, the world destroy your opportunities and it breaks your heart> (1:39:50-1:40:00). This phrase really shows how hard the entrepreneurship journey can be like, but even when all the hope was lost, Joy didn’t give up! This movie shows the real life of an entrepreneur, the real challenges and the rewards that brining a new innovative item to a market could look like and how hard it can be for society to accept this new idea.