The Kenan-Flagler Business School has launched Business 590: Flash Entrepreneurship, a new course where 12 students incorporate business concepts as they organize pop-up shops at The PITCH on Franklin Street.
Their first venture is Heel-o-Ween, where the class partnered with Rubies, one of the nation’s largest costume distributors, to sell costumes and donate all profits to Hurricane Helene relief in western North Carolina.
Sara Frances Butler, one of the students involved in organizing the venture, said the idea for the costume shop originated from a need for a local Halloween store, with the holiday approaching and the closest costume shop being in Durham.
“Another aspect of the class, especially at the beginning, was this whole concept of ideation and using your mind think creatively and come up with concepts that may have been overlooked by other people,” she said.
After realizing there wasn’t a local Halloween store, Butler said she and the class then recognized other needs in the community, which brought them to the topic of Hurricane Helene's damage.
“We are in it for learning, not the money, and [when] the hurricane hit western North Carolina, there was another need for donations and for help up there,” Butler said.
Butler said the course meets once a week at The PITCH, unless the shop is open, saying the class strives to embolden the entrepreneurial spirit of its students while allowing them to experience failure in a zero-loss equation.
Kenan-Flagler alumnus Jared Porter said that he’s assisting in organizing the pop-up shop with Mike Griffin and Willie Barron, the owner and the director of The PITCH, respectively. Porter and Griffin pitched the idea for the course to Shimul Melwani, business school professor of organizational behavior, who connected them with Professor Tim Flood.
“We kind of wanted to put this all into a course that could teach students how to run a successful pop-up shop and just be entrepreneurs in general,” Porter said.
