At Edson E+I and specifically within the Venture Development team, we aspire to establish strategic, meaningful and impactful partnerships with a variety of collaborators that share a mission to support our student entrepreneurs. Over the last couple of years, we’ve aimed to pointedly partner with organizations that provide resources and support to ventures within specific verticals. One such vertical is the retail and product-based space. In the fall of 2018, Venture Devils began to collaborate with the Follett Higher Education Group, the premier partner behind the ASU Sun Devil Campus Stores and Sun Devil Marketplace for all ASU campuses. Since its inception, the Retail Devils program has helped to lower barriers to entry for retail startups by providing dedicated support by experienced mentors in the retail industry, opportunities to showcase and sell their products and get invaluable feedback from both customers and Follett representatives. Retail Devils ventures are continually able to practice their salesmanship, marketing and merchandising skills and increase their knowledge in these pivotal areas in order to continually advance their ventures. One staple of this partnership is the opportunity for these ventures to participate in a pop-up sales event during ASU Family Weekend. Last year, this event was held during a premier PAC 12 football game, and ventures were able to obtain a booth area in order to market and sell their products right inside Sun Devil Marketplace on College Avenue. This provided a high-traffic opportunity for ventures to engage with potential customers, sell their product and obtain invaluable feedback from the community. It was truly a unique and impactful experience for these founders as well as the families that were able to purchase merchandise from our Retail Devils ventures.
In the last year, 5 of our Retail Devils ventures have also been able to obtain Follett vendor contracts, allowing them to continually sell their product(s) in the Sun Devil Marketplace. Below, you’ll learn more about each of these ventures and be able to access their websites where you can track their progress and in some cases, purchase their products. In lieu of an in-person ASU Family Weekend experience, we hope you’ll take the time to take a look at the wonderful things these ventures are doing. We are proud to be able to continually partner with Follett in order to assist our inspired founders to further advance their innovative ideas.
Please check out this awesome video, highlighting the Retail Devils program as well as some of our participating ventures. This video was created in the fall of 2019.
Stonne: https://www.skipnnhole.com
HAT-TAC: https://hat-tac.com/
Resinate Tech: https://www.resinate.tech
Life in Pearls– https://www.lifeinpearls.com/
Café Emporos– https://cafeemporos.com/
