University of Texas Permian Basin students now have a chance to showcase and sell their creations through a program called Student Made.
Mausam Patel is a campus manager for the program.
“We have created a platform where we help student creators … Basically, it’s just a safe space for young entrepreneurs that are still in college who want to get to the platform to sell their products,” Patel said,
“We just allow them to sell their products. You just have to display, show up at pop-ups. We as managers help them sell those products, market them, sell them; do basically everything. It’s a good learning process for us as student managers and for creators as well,” Patel said.
There is a team of seven managers including a campus manager, finance manager, website manager, content creators, community engagement manager and social media manager.
The number of student creators fluctuates, but currently Patel said there are 10 to 15. Student Made was launched in March.
“We’re still developing our social media. We’re finding more creators,” she added.
Right now, they are focused on students for creators for managers. In the fall, they are looking to have pop-ups in places like popular cafes.
“In the future, we do want to get the community involved,” Patel said.
As a management major, she said she was searching for something like Student Made to work on.
“It’s really good experience for me. Since I was looking to get involved in something that’s on campus, so it’s easy for me to be available all the time, helping creators,” Patel said.
Brian Shedd, executive director of the Office of Innovation and Commercialization, said Student Made was launched a couple of months ago.
“Student Made is a small business that was started at a university and now I think they’re at institutions. We’re the first one in Texas; we’re the first one in the UT System. But what they do is they set up these online storefronts for student entrepreneurs, makers, creators, artists. It … gives them a platform to sell their works,” Shedd said.
“It’s run by students. It’s an entirely student-manager team that runs the store and then they go out and they recruit student artists and creators to use the site. A lot of them are budding entrepreneurs. They might be hobbyists, makers. We have a store, studentmadeutpb.com. It’s up now,” Shedd said.
He added that the idea came from Associate Professor of Art Chris Stanley.
“He had mentioned to me that he was having a hard time showing his students how to make a living off of what they love to do. We thought we could merge all the entrepreneurship programming that we’re doing with the student artists and try to give them a way, while they’re in school, to learn how to monetize and create a career out of what they are in school to do,” Shedd said.
But Shedd said it’s bigger than that.
“We have students that are crocheting things; we have students that are … doing screen prints on bags; jewelry; things like that. It’s really … whatever … their passion or hobby is. It gives them an opportunity to advertise that to the student community and the university community, as well. The proceeds go to the students,” he added.
