By Julia Oller | Echo
Membands ($1,850)
Will Severns '15
Public Relations
What is Membands?
Severns: Membands is essentially a mnemonic device that seeks to aid as many as possible in Scripture memorization. A couple months into my freshman year, the Lord had been placing on my heart the conviction of lack of Scripture memorization in my life. Something I had done in the past to memorize Scripture was I'd take a rubber band and I'd write the first letter of every word on the band. Membands is the same general concept, the first letter of every verse, except each verse is going to be placed onto a legit silicone wristband.
What are you doing with the money from Shark Tank? Severns: Praise God for that experience; I just wasn't expecting that. It was such a fun time but humbling as well. Those funds will go toward one of our first shipments of bands. By no means are we where we can mass produce and sell these like we want to eventually, but we're getting there.
What are some of your future goals?
Severns: Almost like a subscription-style service, for four to five dollars a month, you get four to five Membands delivered to your front door. So by the time you memorize those verses you turn around and have four to five more. In terms of full-on launch, it's something that has the potential to get really big really fast. (I'm) getting ready to graduate. There's no better time to take on a venture like this. This summer seems to be a plausible time for us to take off. By then, we should have a lot of the pieces of the puzzle set into place.
What's your vision for Membands?
Severns: A huge verse I come back to is Psalm 119:11. I don't think that one can ever underestimate the power of hiding Scripture in your heart. Especially getting toward the end of my time at Taylor, we're not always going to have another year to come back to. If that's the reality you're living in, what's your backbone going forward? I would hope it would be Scripture and hiding it in your heart. So there are a lot of theological implications of why I want to see this come to fruition. It's not really silicone wristbands, even though that's the device we're going through. It's more so the "why" of doing this.
XLSneakerSale ($1,500)
Keaton Hendricks '18
Business/Entrepreneurship
What's your idea?
Hendricks: (Refurbishing) Jordan retro shoes-that's what I deal with specifically. I can refurbish almost every pair I get.
How do you refurbish shoes?
Hendricks: One of the crazy exotic things I do is iron shoes. I use a steamer to take all the creases out-repainting, regluing, bleaching. As long as there's no major flaw, no rips, you can make almost every shoe look close to brand new.
Where do you buy the shoes?
Hendricks: I've been doing it for 13 months, and I've built up a network of people I buy them from. I can offer up $1,000 to $2,000, and I can get a lot of pairs for that much money. I always say, "money talks."
How did you first get interested in doing this?
Hendricks: It started as a hobby, and in just a few months, it's become bigger than I ever thought it would be. In September of 2013, I bought my first pair. After wearing them for four months I cleaned them up and sold them and I actually made money off of them. At the end of August this year I put down $500 and said, "Let's see what I can do with this." $500 for five pairs turned into eight, then 12 and now, depending on how much I want to spend, I can house up to 40 pairs at one time.
What are you doing with your money from Shark Tank?
Hendricks: One thing they encouraged me to do was to hire somebody (and) I've already found someone who will work with me. It was actually someone local who came up to me after the presentation and said he would love to do it. Since I play on the basketball team, I don't have every Saturday to sit in my dorm room and paint shoes so it'll really help me.
Where do you sell them?
Hendricks: Instagram is huge for selling shoes, believe it or not. A lot of people choose Instagram over Ebay because Ebay charges a 10 percent fee. If you're selling shoes for $300, then $30 is a lot of money. Instagram is really made for shoes.
How many pairs do you have?
Hendricks: I don't really wear them that much. I feel like I'm losing money every time I wear them.
The Beauty Project ($900)
Sam Petersen '17 Secondary Education/Spanish
Andrew Brill '15 Business Management
Nicole Arpin '17 Public Relations
What's your idea?
Petersen: We're working to change the conversation around beauty to focus more on a biblical view of both inward and outward beauty. The Beauty Project is our overall name, and the Princess Blitz (PB) is one of the events that we are going to host.
What is the Princess Blitz?
Petersen: The Princess Blitz is an after-school event for elementary school-aged girls. These girls get to wear a crown and put on a dress and experience that healthy version of beauty in a culture where beauty is not biblically based anymore. A girl's worth has become wrapped up in her appearance and that really spoke to all of us.
How did you become a team?
Brill: We met this summer at Praxis, a culture and thinking academy that focuses culture making from a business and entrepreneurship standpoint.
Petersen: We all work together really well. It's a very liberal arts-minded team because Nicole's public relations, Andrew's business and I'm education. Those majors really shouldn't go together, but somehow we do.
What are you doing with the money from Shark Tank?
Petersen: We want to put on another PB in the near future so the money will be used to put on another PB, to start doing them so we can say, "this worked and this didn't." The only way we're going to be successful and to learn is by doing and failing and trying again.
How did you pull your Shark Tank idea together?
Brill: We've met twice a week every week and Nicole's phoned in about once a week. The very first thing we did was spout all of our ideas. It was like vomit: ideas everywhere. We categorized those and decided to focus on our cultural theology.
What are your dreams for this in the future?
Arpin: Right now we're in our refining phase. We know what we believe about the beauty culture and how we want to affect it. So now it's taking that vision and molding it into a product or service that's going to improve the conversation and provide more fodder for conversation.
