Students Market Clothing with Conscience

B-schoolers from Miami University of Ohio team with socially-conscious fashion brand Edun for a lesson in helping Africa through commerce

by Kerry Miller

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A new pilot program at Miami University of Ohio is combining two big trends in the world of business education—social entrepreneurship and experiential learning—and adding one very big name to that mix: Bono.

The initiative, dubbed Edun Live on Campus, is a business partnership between a group of Miami University students and Edun, the clothing company co-founded last year by activist Ali Hewson, Bono's wife, and designer Rogan Gregory—along with a little help from Hewson's rock star husband.

As a "socially conscious" clothing company, Edun says its mission is "trade, not aid"—creating sustainable employment in the developing world, and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Its primary fashion line sells in upmarket department stores and specialty shops such as Saks Fifth Avenue (SKS) and Anthropologie. A sub-brand, Edun Live, was created as a higher-volume business-to-business arm selling blank T-shirts that are "100% African," from the organic cotton they're made with to the manufacturing. Bono's band, U2, uses Edun Live blanks for their concert tees.

School Spirit

The Miami University students buy the blank shirts from Edun Live for about $4 per shirt, have them screen-printed with custom designs, and sell them to student groups and local businesses for about $10 each—a few dollars more than similar T-shirts sourced locally would cost. The group's profits, which average $1 per shirt, go to fund social entrepreneurship activities at the school, including a proposed student trip to visit Edun's factory in Africa.

A Miami alumnus provided the initial $50,000 of seed capital to get the project up and running, and Edun executives are serving on Edun Live's board of directors. So far the students have sold about 2,000 shirts, and they hope to roll out their business model to campuses across the country later this year.

In doing so, they're getting a living lesson in social entrepreneurship and innovative solutions to social problems, rather than just creating profits. Enthusiasm for the approach has been growing for some time at the MBA level, though it's still just catching on among undergraduate B-schoolers.

Expanding the Field

Over the past three years or so, undergraduate courses, centers, and clubs devoted to social entrepreneurship have been popping up at schools like University of California at Berkeley, Duke, and Stanford. Last fall, New York University launched the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship, an interdisciplinary program for junior and senior undergraduate students, and Wake Forest University is now offering a new interdisciplinary minor in Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise.

At Miami University, things got off the ground last fall when Assistant Professor Brett Smith helped launch a new Center for Social Entrepreneurship within the Farmer School of Business, devoted to furthering teaching, research, and outreach related to the topic. He also created and taught the school's first undergraduate course on social entrepreneurship, which by next year Smith hopes to expand to a three-course sequence.