Guest post written by students/team members, 2018 Applied Economics business class

As many of you know, we started a t-shirt business a couple years ago and were lucky enough to land a few clients last semester including Science Olympiad, Tabletop Gaming, Face to Face, Math Club & Black Empowerment Club (BEC). BEC was perhaps the most interesting, yet challenging as they gave us a graphic that had been designed on Custom Ink, a website that only sells shirts and not graphics. Luckily, in our Applied Economics class there were some students – Nate T & Alex C – who came to the rescue. Working as a team, Alex & Nate were able to import the logo into Illustrator and trace the logo with the pen tool, recreating it as a high resolution vector file. Students Lucia and Reina helped with font options and after many discussions with the BEC student leaders… voila, a new logo was created! Just another day in the life of a t-shirt business which includes sales people, graphic designers, a production team and more.

Big business or small business there’s bound to be some obstacles. The EntrepreNEERS have dealt with some minor road bumps when it has come to our small scale t-shirt business, but nothing we couldn’t work through. Challenges we came across this semester…

• Having to create logos in Adobe Illustrator with minimal knowledge of the program. In the future we hope to teach more students how to use graphic software and in the meantime, are thankful for some dedicated students that spent hours learning and creating!
• Learning how to use a heat press, vinyl cutter and the corresponding software.
• Deadlines and time crunch of getting supplies ordered in time, accounting for holiday shipping and making shirts before yearbook photos.

Students are taking advantage of the opportunity to utilize hands-on experience and learn how to start a business from the ground up. We are gaining knowledge, working hard and taking the business world from pen and paper and applying it into our lives to run an actual business.

We’d like to close by thanking some people that have helped us get started. Our t-shirt business is improving every year and the Olentangy EntrepreNEERS couldn’t have done it without their support! First, we would like to show our gratitude to the Olentangy Education Foundation and the generous grant we were given so we could grow our student-run business. With the funds we were able to upgrade our heat press, obtain a starter vinyl cutter and some other needed supplies. Through OEF we’ve been partnered this year with Roush Honda and look forward to working with them to gain more insight on business, marketing and “the real world” outside of our classroom walls. Lastly, we would like to give a special shout out to all our student club orders and the wonderful Zinn Family for purchasing custom vacation shirts. Have fun on your trip!