Senior Jaylen Patel has made a step towards entrepreneurship with his senior venture project. The initiative gives Patel real-world experience in running a business from start to finish, including all aspects. His project involves designing, marketing, and selling hoodies to students, staff and the school community. Patel managed every aspect of the operation, including selecting materials, setting prices, creating promotional strategies and handling sales.

“My senior ventures project is meant for aspiring entrepreneurs and giving them opportunities,” Patel said. “Specifically, it was about creating a product in the high school and guiding the students who are interested.”

Patel met with Rana Andrews, who runs the Darlington bookstore, to look over purchases to figure out what sells the best. “We wanted to figure out what students would be most interested in purchasing,” Patel said. He concluded that he was going to sell hoodies.

“After we settled on the hoodie, we met with Mr. [Doug] Hamil to work on making a design for the hoodie,” Patel said. “This is our product development phase, where we are actually working on the product and what we want it to look like.”

From there, Patel took the design to Cedarstream, a design printer company, and communicated with a representative named Greg. Then Patel and his team tested materials and ran the numbers for prices and profit margins.

“We just went through their process with picking the hoodie brand and developing the website, and once we were happy with our hoodie brand we started launching it,” Patel said. “…In our marketing phase we decided on how we wanted to market it, so we went to the front of chapel and presented it to the students and faculty. We also posted it on social media and put up flyers around the school.”

Patel and his team of students are donating all of the profits to the Boys and Girls Club because he “wants to make sure it can go towards students who can use it for their education and who do not get as many academic opportunities as other kids.”

Patel stated that he spent the first semester learning about the different phases of introducing a product. He talked numerous times with alumni to get insight from them. He also spent time educating other students about what he had learned from entrepreneurship and developing a product.

“I feel like this project was a success not only because of the hoodies I am selling, but because of the experience that comes with making a product like this,” Patel said. “The experience of doing this is more valuable than actually selling a product right now, and getting to teach everyone.”