Student Businesses Thrive On Campus

Over the years, Exonians have found several ways to generate cash. From the delivery service Swyft, which faded after its founders graduated, to the new trend of printmaking students selling their work, Exeter has served as a breeding ground for student entrepreneurs to build companies such as Love to All, Instabite and SnackLords.

These companies not only provide income, goods and services, but they also initiate social change. On Nov. 12, 2018, an Instagram page for the Love to All project—dedicated to “empowering LGBTQ+ youth”—launched their first clothing line available for order. The group hosted a booth in Phelps Commons the following Friday and provided 20 shirts and many stickers for an excited audience of peers.

Upper and co-founder Justin Li described the company as a “queer, youth-run publication and clothing brand.” The group hopes to include people of the queer community and directly support them. Li added, “all of our clothes are designed by queer youth and a large percent of our profits go towards charities.”

Li reported the profits so far, saying, “our first collection of 20 shirts raised 600 dollars, and we’re working on our second collection, which is projected to raise 16,000 USD.”

“The main reason I actually started the project itself was because I was really passionate about fashion, about art, about LGBT activism, about business,” Li said. “So this was a combination of all of my passions.”

In addition to selling shirts for their brand, Love to All also runs a publication that focuses on queer issues from varying perspectives. “We conduct interviews with LGBTQ+ figures [where] we learn about their stories, their careers, and they provide advice for queer youth as well,” Li said.

Although Love to All is a nonprofit organization that uses its revenue for future projects, they struggled to obtain support from the school. “The truth is, this school has supported me very minimally. I’ve found it very challenging … Whether that be finding a space to work in … or conducting photo shoots for the clothing and stuff like that,” Li said. 

After the challenges, Love to All has been able to establish a successful brand. “The cool thing about our project is that it’s not limited to campus,” Li said. “We’re a registered corporation and so we’re going to do US-wide shipping,” he said. “It’s growing really quickly.”

Through student influence, Love to All has effectively fulfilled its social-driven mission. “Originally, we started with students on campus, but now we’ve extended internationally. We have designers from China, from Vancouver, Canada, all over the world,” Li said.

Similarly, students have found other ways to harness student interest to build on-campus brands. Lower Jack Puchalski launched his own food delivery service in January 2019 and has been growing the company, Instabite, since then.

Puchalski’s business offers students meals from local town restaurants varying from McDonalds to Lexie’s and promises to deliver in around 50 minutes. He and his employees then bike to retrieve orders and charge a small delivery fee in addition to the cost of the meal.

In a similar vein, lower Jacob Feigenberg, inspired by the dorm grills in Dunbar, Wentworth, Webster, Main Street and others, began his own version of dorm grill in Soule Hall. “A lot of people kept coming to me for my snacks, and I wasn’t really selling them, so I thought, why don’t I just sell them instead of just giving them out for free?” Feigenberg said.

After finding success in his own dorm, Feigenberg decided to expand to the entire campus by starting SnackLords. “We saw pretty significant profits [within Soule]. So we thought, why don’t we just expand this campuswide?” Feigenberg said. He then invited more friends to help him with operating the company.

Lower and co-founder of SnackLords Joshua Lum focused on marketing to a larger audience and further establishing the company. “We’ve tried to take the branding a little more seriously,” he said. “When we changed our logo, we made it to be more formal like a real business.”

Initially, students were unsure if SnackLords was one of the many Instabite parodies, but the group has been working to build trust. “I think [Saturday]’s Relay for Life booth really helped establish us as a real business,” Lum said. “We were able to show customers our products and exactly what they’re going to get from this.” The Relay for Life booth offered students the opportunity to place their name in a raffle, for one of SnackLords’ four snack package options. From each bag, the founders picked a name and delivered the designated package to the winner.

Co-founder and lower Louis Mukama was happy with the results from the event. “The point of Relay for Life wasn’t to sell packs. We’re helping the cause so we gave away four packs totally out of our expense,” he said. “We also were hoping to get some publicity from that event. And I think we did.”

Feigenberg outlined the company’s current profits. “Over our three weeks of business, we’ve received on average 35+ orders per week. We will be over 100 deliveries after this week—our third week of business—gaining 10-15 first time customers each week.”

Whenever companies emerge on campus, they must first verify with the deans in order to “confirm with lawyers of the campus that [they] are not affiliated with the school,” according to Mukama. During winter term, Feigenberg worked with Dean of Students Melissa Mischke to found the company, and, due to delayed approval from Mischke, was only recently able to begin rolling out their company plans.

SnackLords is looking at similar future possibilities but has not confirmed any new plans yet. “We have been in talks with … people at other schools right now,” Feigenberg said. “It’s a long ways off, but yes, if it’s super successful here at Exeter and we see a market for it in other places, we’ll look further into it.”