When a group of students enrolled in the elective Marketing last year, they had no idea that the class would lead to a new group of friends, along with a successful business. Seniors Beck Nash, Isaiah Pile, Kathryn Peed and Nolan Colwell, along with junior Camron Alanos, are now in their second year of marketing, in the course Advanced Entrepreneurship & Innovation, and have much more than just grades to show for it.
Marketing and Fashion Marketing are both semester-long 4×4 courses at PA. According to Ashely Brickner, teacher of both classes, they are centered around the basic principles of marketing, with Fashion Marketing applied to the fashion industry. “We look at how other businesses create their brands,” explains Brickner. “How they are successful in promoting their business, how they choose who they are going to target and how they choose their customers.” All of these skills, Brickner says, will help students later on if they choose to continue pursuing the elective.
Once students have taken either marketing course as a prerequisite, students can take Advanced Entrepreneurship & Innovation, where senior Beck Nash describes how the topics from the previous year become much more hands-on. “We’re getting a taste of the real business world,” says Nash. “Compared to Marketing, this year the content is coming alive.”
After a few weeks of learning more about entrepreneurship, students in the class were assigned a project that is going to last the entire semester. Their goal: create a successful business that receives funding from investors.
Once the students come up with their idea for a product, they head to Stihl, an outdoor power equipment company, whose US headquarters is in Virginia Beach. There, they present their product to a panel of executives to receive funding for their business. “Imagine Junior Shark Tank,” explains senior Isaiah Pile. This process is in collaboration with a non-profit named Junior Achievement, whose goal is to “inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy.”
To create their own business, Nash describes he and his group began their project with “a mess of brainstorming.” To gauge what the student body of PA (their target audience) was interested in consuming, the group sent out a survey. At first, a majority of responses from students interest in items like “cars, computers [and] phones” which Nash explains was “stuff that we can’t replicate, so after some more discussion, we leaned into another angle: why not let people customize the items they already own? Instead of us having to replicate something ourselves, why not let people enhance what they already have?”
Nash and those in his group, along with a few others in the class, took preexisting products and made them their own. To make a product fulfilling the students’ desire for personal customization, Nash and his group, Backpack Bling, primarily bought traditionally sewn-on patches from Amazon, but adapted them to become unique. The group added a type of tape to the patches that can be easily removed with water, allowing the user to change the location of the patches multiple times.
Another group in the class, composed of seniors Noella Diamond and Chloe Wheeler along with junior Celina Larsen, also based their product off the desire for self-expression. Their business, named Charmz, provides students with an affordable alternative to the class ring with charm bracelets. Those who purchase the bracelets are able to customize their accessory with charms representing school related activities like sports or other extracurriculars. “Some people don’t like the look of class rings, they find them too bulky,” explains senior Noella Diamond. “So if you’re not interested in that, you can still apply your own style, but in a way that fits the same as a class ring.” Their products can be found of Instagram @charmz_company_pa.
Before presenting their business to investors, the students practiced presenting to other classes and teachers, making sure to outline factors like target market, demographics and psychographics–the classification of people by their attitudes and desires–in their presentation. Then the class, along with entrepreneurship classes from Kellam, Ocean Lakes and Kempsville, traveled to Stihl’s offices to try to get their products funded.
“The morning we went to Stihl we were all super excited, but obviously also super nervous,” said Pile. The pressure of presenting was felt among all groups. “You’re in this super big room with super important people,” described senior Chloe Wheeler. “You’re presenting in front of all of them and they’re just judging you.” Regardless of any nerves, both groups were successful in their presentations, receiving their desired funding. Charmz ended up receiving second place among the 30 teams that were there.
No matter their ranking, many of the students were satisfied with their performance. “We were really proud of ourselves…I think we all felt really accomplished,” said Nash. Backpack Bling received funding from Stihl’s Chief Informations Officer Tom Scott, who also gave them valuable information, according to Nash. “He’s a fantastic guy but he’s also very practical,” Nash explains. Specifically, Scott explained to the class the importance of making sure your finances are planned out well. “We got as much data as we could with our market research and we ran all of our results through price elasticity algorithms, [and] some probability algorithms to really determine how many people we need to sell to…so with his pressure on us, it really made us pay a whole lot more attention to the process.”
Along with advice from investors, the students also learned valuable lessons from the experience itself. After being able to watch the other groups present, Wheeler describes she saw the importance of communication, not just in the instance of their situation. “You want to have a good look when you’re presenting yourself to someone,” she explains.
Along with communication, Diamond describes the entire experience, between presenting at Stihl to selling their product to students, has really helped with self-confidence. “We were very scared because we’ve never put ourselves out there, but now it’s very interesting because we’ve gained a sense of self-confidence. A lot of people aren’t as scary as you think they are and they’re very interested in what you have to say,” says Diamond.
Besides confidence, the group also believes the experience taught much about teamwork and collaboration. “This entire thing has been a test of collaboration,” describes Nash. “We have to trust each other, we give each other responsibilities, we’re all leaning on each other to operate and it’s gone incredibly so far.”
According to junior Celina Larsen, the class in general connects to many real-world areas, compared to classes like biology, for example. “A lot of people complain about high school [having] unnecessary knowledge…but this is actually something that you can use,” she explains. Nash shares Larsen’s opinion, saying “you will not find better hands-on experience at PA.”
For Nash, being able to go through these experiences while still being in high school is what makes the class the most valuable. “I don’t want to say we had hand-holding, but in the real world you’re completely by yourself,” Nash elaborates. “We were lucky to have mentors, we were lucky to have a lot of guidance along the way. But after having this taste of running a business, especially with a really good group, it might just be a dream but I feel like taking it on.”
