The Entrepreneurship Incubator class, offered through the Gordy Family Center for Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Finance, or CLEF, is preparing students for a major pitch event later this spring semester.
Students in the yearlong entrepreneurship elective have spent the academic year developing business ideas, refining prototypes and honing presentation skills under the guidance of mentors from the business community.
The course, titled “Entrepreneurship Incubator: Taking Your Ideas to Market,” emphasizes real-world application, from ideation and market research to team collaboration and pitching for potential seed funding.
The upcoming pitch session represents a culmination of students’ work as teams will present to evaluators in hopes of securing resources to advance their ventures toward production and marketing.
Senior Alex Shaw is part of a four-person team, including senior Elizabeth Marshall, junior William Donnelly and senior Caleb Pitts. They created Cinch, an adjustable and detachable waist tightener. The device clips onto clothing to provide a customizable fit, serving as an affordable alternative to costly tailoring or alterations.
Shaw said the idea stemmed from personal frustration with inconsistent sizing across clothing brands.
“Whenever I’m ordering jeans online, for example, there’s a big size discrepancy across different brands so it’s really hard to find my true size and I didn’t want to pay for alterations,” Shaw said. “I’ve tried to sew my own jeans together to get the waist to fit better but even that didn’t work so great, so that’s why I was looking for another solution.”
The team first pitched its concept to business professionals who then became mentors. The students now are gearing up for a funding round.
“In the future we are going to be pitching in order to receive seed funding so that we can actually start to make our own product,” Shaw said. “And I think at first most of that money will also go to marketing as well. It’s a really cool learning experience.”
Junior Milly Watson highlighted the collaborative nature of the class. Students began the year working individually before forming teams and collectively developing their business concepts.
“We have been working really hard on our pitches all year long,” Watson said. “The very first month we started working individually and then after that, we got assigned our team groups and came up with a business idea all together and since then I’ve just been working on our group business idea.”
One standout idea from her group is a smart toothbrush that connects to a game, designed to engage children and reduce resistance to brushing.
“The most important skill I’ve learned is how to cooperate with others and be a team player,” Watson said. “Trip O’Donnell came up with our pitch idea for a smart toothbrush that connects to a game to keep kids engaged and not complain about brushing their teeth.”
The spring pitch event is expected to showcase the ingenuity of Kinkaid’s Upper School students while providing them with a realistic taste of entrepreneurial challenges and rewards.
