In our entrepreneurship class at James Madison University , Jacob Little, Maggie Nelson, Jessie Hemmerly, and I designed and sold a JMU themed sweatshirt to raise money for a local charity of our choice. At the end of the semester we would present on our process with the winner receiving a scholarship as part of the Hisaoka-Pahlevani Social Impact Challenge. Our team, the "Retro Dukes" took first place raising over $4000 dollars for New Creation VA , a fair trade shop in Harrisonburg that works to prevent human trafficking.
Contributors
Jacob Little,
Jessie Hemerly, Maggie Nelson
We conducted research of a multitudes of designs and who would be the best fit market to sell to though surveys we made which had hundreds of responses. We ended up landing on a Duke dog (JMU's mascot) parody of Taylor Swifts iconic Era's tour design. We had to take in many factors including, the amount of colors, the fabric of the cloth, and how it would be printed on, becuase all adjusted the price of the sweatshirt. We ended going up with a two color screen print on ethically sourced material becuase we wanted to have our process allign with New Creation VA's morals.
We operated a social media page, printed out over a 100 flyers and hung them up around campus, did multiple photo shoots, including one with the Vice President of Student Affairs, Tim miller, who is micro influencer and campus celebrity boasting over 22.6k followers. We also did a video series for a donation week which we were able to raise over $1000 in just one week in which we promised to shave my head if we reached that goal (keep scrolling to see if we ended up keeping our promise.)
We tabled around campus, sold at games, events, and club meetings. We also sold in store at the fair trade shop. We were able to sell out of the sweatshirts and made a total of $4,291.73. During our final presentation. We stuck towards our promise of shaving my head, and shaved it mid presentation! With all of that we came first place out of 6 teams and were awarded the Hisaoka-Pahlevani Social Impact Challenge scholarship.
sweatshirts sold
total raised
independent donations
