Recently, student businesses in Entrepreneurship, a single-term elective, have popped up all around campus. Student entrepreneurs have been selling their services and accessories on campus, providing new and exciting products to the community.
The 2018-2019 Course Catalogue offers the Entrepreneurship class in the spring term to fifth and sixth formers who have taken Macroeconomics. The Entrepreneurship class not only teaches the basics of business but also pushes students to challenge themselves by creating their own companies from scratch.
Mr. Sam Doak, who teaches the class, initially funds every business with $100. From there, the student companies strive to gain revenue. At the end of the spring term, all profits made by the students are donated to the Student-For-Student Scholarship Charity.
Without a doubt, Entrepreneurship students have put great effort into establishing their own business plans and executing them through advertising and marketing. Students combined their innovation with their economic knowledge to create fun products for the student body.
Kitan Ayeni ’19, Joe Coyne ’19, Kaki Su ’19, and Siri Palreddy ’20 run one of the businesses, Mystery, Inc.. The company sells care packages you can send to your friends for five dollars a piece. The buyer fills out a form picking out what snacks they want to gift to their friend.
Through advertising in the dining hall and over social media, the students behind the company have made their mark. “In these past two weeks, we have sold over 70 care packages. [We] individually compiled them and hand-delivered them to each dorm room or day student locker. So, it’s been a lot,” Palreddy said. “We’ve established an instagram following on @crhmysteryinc. And if you noticed, last school meeting, we managed to get some product placement when Ms. Judy Senft and Ms. Mb Duckett-Ireland held up our care package.”
However, like all beginnings to businesses, Palreddy also revealed how money and time are not readily available: “Essentially, we pay a lot of attention to our product. And then there’s the whole process of organizing the packages by dorm and then walking to all the dorms to put the packages outside the room, so it can be hard to find a time to meet up and pack the products.”
Nevertheless, Palreddy and the Mystery, Inc. entrepreneurs have applied their macroeconomic skills into the larger scheme of the student economy. As the company seeks to offer friends an opportunity to support one another, it affects the community in a unique, inspiring way.
I Survived Hats, another new student-run business, offers a humorous and clever accessory to students. The hats are a popular commodity, as the clever design compels students to show off that they have “survived” the jungle that is Choate. Clay Zachery ’19 said, “We thought about kids that are making it through Choate and go through all the crazy stuff that happens, [and] they can wear it as a unifying, kind of nostalgic item.”
In addition, Zachery spoke to the lack of student demand in the midst of spring term. “Especially with the spring, everyone has been drained of buying dorm items, club items, and game T-shirts. By the time you get to the last couple of weeks, they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m spending a lot of money on other stuff. I don’t know.’”
Yet, the entrepreneurs of the business still accomplished a few unexpected goals when the company first opened. “Right now, we have 85 people signed up to get a hat, so we’ve made a profit of over $350, which is much more than we expected at first,” said Zachery. Fun, funny, and fashionable, the hats cheer up students working through what many claim to be the hardest stretch of the year.
Stock Up, another student-run business, is a snack-delivery service. It provides a cheaper and easier option for delivering food from stores like Walmart. explained the company’s process. “We looked at Uber costs, and to go to Walmart and back, it costs $14,” said John Buckholtz ’20, one of the company’s founders. “We charge only five dollars, so it’s more than 50% less than what Uber already charges.”
With this alternative way to “stock up” on snacks, the company has profited from students across campus. And, much like Mystery, Inc., Stock Up is on a time crunch. “We were not given a lot of money to start up this company, so we have to start profiting right off the bat if we want to keep it up and running.”
The creators of the company sought out the heads of multiple dorms in order to acquire permission to send mass advertisement emails. The company has used tactics such as these to increase the demand for their service, which is starting to help achieve their goal of gaining revenue with only a few weeks remaining in the school year.
Most agree that the diverse line-up of student businesses on campus is a distinctive product of the Choate curriculum. Not only does it encourage students to think about marketing and business management, but it also allows the school to benefit from its revenue, since the profits supports the scholarship fund.
“I feel like [this class] brings out a lot of new things about Choate culture,” said Zachery. “In the next couple of years, you will see people wearing stuff that has been made in Entrepreneurship. It’s not a short-lived class. It lives on.”
