Anna Martucci
Contributing Writer
ShopDU is Dominican’s brand-new website to promote DU student entrepreneurs.
Starting Dec. 8, ShopDU will be an all-in-one referral site to connect entrepreneurial DU students with the Dominican community.
ShopDU will be a website with different categories such as products, services and art/creative services. Once a category is selected, people will be able to view various brands, read about who the student business owners are, what they do, their brand identity, and a link to their brand’s website. At this time, however, nothing will be directly sold on ShopDU’s website.
Marketed as a referral site, ShopDU will provide users with the links to students’ websites.
“Students can have that support system and have the sort of initial right place to kind of brand and market themselves,” said Bianca Beteta, assistant director of internships and externships in the Office of Career Programs and Employer Relations.
Students can submit their applications to join ShopDU here: https://bit.ly/ShopDU. Through this form, students provide a description of their business, the link to their website and a picture of their logo. The brand website is checked for appropriateness and activity. As of right now, the application process is fairly loose to make ShopDU as accessible to as many students as possible. There will be a tiered pricing system in place after the six-month trial.
Students will be charged $5 every month to have their business on ShopDU. For $30 each month, a business can be the Business Spotlight on the front page of the website. For $50 per month, a business can have its logo as the thumbnail for the category their brand falls into. The money will go toward operational costs of the website, according to Beteta.
Ten businesses have already registered to join ShopDU.
“As a student working on ShopDU, what really got me interested was being in the business and fashion departments at Dominican, a lot of students have their own businesses but really only promote themselves through Instagram, so it can be hard for other students to know that their peers even have businesses,” said Kathryn Greenlea, marketing manager of ShopDU and co-owner of Pho-Mo Magazine, one of the brands that will be featured on ShopDU.
Greenlea is a senior at DU, double majoring in marketing and fashion merchandising. Her and her grandmother, Barb, have been working on Pho-Mo Magazine since 2018. Photographers and models submit photos to Pho-Mo to be formatted into a magazine. Any students or alumni interested in supporting Pho-Mo Magazine will be able to read about the brand and access a link to their website on ShopDU.
“It could help a lot of people who not only have businesses but are thinking of starting them. I think it’ll give people a head start to know that they are already supported and they don’t have to start from ground zero,” Greenlea said.
Other brands registered on ShopDU include Monjude Studio, jewelry brand, and Muñoz Auto Detailing. Businesses featured on ShopDU can either be owned by DU alumni or current students.
Since October, Greenlea and Beteta have worked on the ShopDU project. Jamie Shaw, executive director of Career Programs, and Mike Kiyosaki, clinical professor of management from the Brennan School of Business, thought up the idea of ShopDU to support students in creative majors like fashion, graphic design and business, because many of these students have their own businesses.
