A group of five undergraduate students turned a $20 startup project in University of Iowa professor Bob Walker’s entrepreneurial finance class into a business that raised $6,000 for the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital.
The students — Jaelyn Boley, Natalie Noonan, Jackson Glenn, Jared Weeks, and Jacob Sommer — are all third- and fourth-year students in the Tippie College of Business. Together, they developed the idea of black-and-gold beer koozies featuring the phrase “Wave to the Brave,” honoring the Hawkeye Wave that has become a football game staple since 2017.
“After the first quarter of the Hawkeye football games, everyone turns to the children’s hospital and waves to the kids that are on the top floor,” Boley said.
The group titled their project “Koozies for a Cause” and began to spread the word to family and friends. With the project’s four-week timeline, the students weren’t able to establish a system to fulfill and ship online orders. But their word-of-mouth strategy quickly began drawing sales.
“Within the first two weeks, we’d made $2,000, which was really cool,” Glenn said.
For the group, donating the project’s proceeds to the Stead Family Children’s Hospital was an obvious choice. They unanimously agreed that it wouldn’t feel right to focus their project on the hospital without contributing the profits to its cause.
“We would have felt guilty using the children’s hospital for profit,” Weeks said.
The students explained that the class project didn’t restrict how profits could be used, allowing groups to divide and keep their earnings as they saw fit. However, Weeks noted that after their group announced plans to donate their proceeds to the children’s hospital, other groups were inspired to do the same.
“After we said that we were donating to the children’s hospital, about every other group switched to donating to something and doing it for a cause,” Weeks said. “I would say we caused a wave in our class.”
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A previous group in Walker’s entrepreneurial finance class also achieved impressive results with the $20 startup project. In 2021, students Peyton Haack and Gratt Reed raised over $3,000 with their Water 4 Wellness initiative, also donating the profits to the Stead Family Children’s Hospital. This success set a high standard that the Koozies for a Cause team aimed to exceed.
“I definitely wanted to do better than them, but $6,000 off of koozies was crazy,” Noonan said.
The group worked together to coin the phrase “Koozies for a Cause” and collaborated to design the koozies, incorporating imagery of the hospital and a unique font that differentiated their merchandise from other Hawkeye Wave items. The students described the entire process as seamless and team-oriented.
“There was no turmoil based off ideas. We all listened to each other,” Weeks said.
The students explained that their donation will contribute to the hospital’s general fund, supporting families of long-term patients with expenses such as travel and food. In appreciation of their contribution, they were invited to the top floor of the children’s hospital for a guided tour.
“Just to see how nice it was and hearing about all the stuff they do for the kids was super cool,” Glenn said. “It had a big impact on me.”