Forget the standard college sweatshirt.  At Oberlin College, not many students wear college-logo clothes anyway.  But now, thanks to a seven-week entrepreneurship project, the college bookstore is about to offer quirky student-designed T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts better attuned to the Oberlin sensibility.  At least, they seemed to be last month at the fashion show where the student designs were shown off to a cheering audience and a panel of alumni experts, including Michael Alexin, Target’s vice president for product design and development.  “We wanted a ‘Project Runway’ kind of event, but of course Finney Chapel doesn’t have a runway, so it was more a fashion show,” said Andrea Kalyn, the associate dean for academic affairs and director of the project. “We wanted to see which designs resonated most.”  The winning designs, which will be sold at the campus bookstore just in time for commencement over Memorial Day weekend, are very Oberlin. One shows a red-eyed albino squirrel, a common sight on campus. One features a “womb chair,” a cushy, orange, orb-like chair that decades of Oberlin library users have crawled into to read or nap.  “I am completely excited to see my work bought and worn,” said Karl Orozco, the freshman who designed the womb chair.  Mr. Orozco also designed another favorite: a view of the world as seen from the Oberlin campus in Ohio, along the lines of the famous New Yorker cover, with Cleveland, the Appalachians, New York and the Atlantic Ocean receding in the distance. Production of that shirt has been deferred until the fall, to give the students time to deal with any copyright issues arising from the takeoff.  Designing and choosing the images was only part of the process.  “We didn’t want it to end up being just a T-shirt competition; we wanted to wring as much entrepreneurial value out of it as we could,” said Lauren Abendschein, Oberlin’s assistant director for entrepreneurships. “Beyond the design, the students had to figure out how to make a display, how to do the merchandising, how do we make it a brand?”  About a dozen students from various classes and fields of study worked on the project, splitting into a marketing team and a design team.  “Remember, Oberlin is a liberal arts college with no design department,” said Mr. Alexin, who worked with the students throughout the process. “This was a group of smart, passionate students majoring in neuroscience or math or music, plunging into design.”  Apparel with a college logo has the highest profit margin of any merchandise in college bookstores, according to the National Association of College Stores. And Barnes & Noble, which runs more than 600 college bookstores, including Oberlin’s, says that such clothes sell best at colleges with strong sports programs and team spirit.  But at a place like Oberlin, which prides itself more on eclecticism than athletics, the campus aesthetic is different.  “We wear strange things, we’re a peculiar little community,” said Margot Hanley, a senior economics major on the marketing team.  “Oberlin students don’t really like to self-identify as one thing or another,” she said. “It’s mostly only the athletes who buy apparel that says Oberlin, so there was clearly an omitted market for us to reach.”  At the start, Ms. Hanley said, the students had far-ranging ideas — maybe finding a local fabric producer in Cleveland, maybe producing a line of long dresses in sunset colors — but the short turnaround time squashed those dreams for now.  Starting this month, the bookstore is offering the group’s T-shirts for $15 and its organic cotton hoodies for $50. But the hope is for the project to expand next year.  “I think it’s such a cool idea that any student interested in fashion, marketing or business will be interested in getting involved,” Ms. Hanley said. “I still want to see long hemp dresses with cutouts.”
An entrepreneurship project at Oberlin College in Ohio let students express their own distinctive views of campus life.