The Springboard Elevator Pitch announced the overall winner of the competition last week – Emineo Art Gallery and crowd favorite, Highflyer.

The Springboard Elevator Pitch is an ideas challenge for students to display their concept to a group of investors, judges, students and staff. Each presentation was restricted to two-minutes. The  short time is given in order to imitate the feeling of quickly explaining an idea to other people on an elevator ride.

Thomas Griffin, senior marketing major from Marble Falls pitched his winning idea, Emineo Art Gallery. Griffin has a lot of friends who are art majors trying to sell their art, but their most frequent purchasers are their friends or family. Griffin thought it would be a good idea to start a college art gallery website that endorses college students’ art.

“I started a platform for students to display their art on the site while also learning about business,” Griffin said.

“I designed a dashboard that would let artists log in and track the market trends, learn about the demographics of the people who are visiting the site and also set and kind of change some variables, like pricing.”

A nervous Griffin pitched his winning idea in a packed Hart Auditorium, and was awarded a total of $1,500.

“It’s a safe environment I think for students to try it out; it’s not shark tank, where they are going to cut you down. The investors and some students talked with me afterwards, they had some critiques, but they also had a lot of encouraging things to say,” Griffin said.

Matt Sanderson, senior marketing and finance major from Lubbock, and Garrett Wentz, senior biology major from Lubbock pitched their crowd favorite, Highflyer in a fun, passionate and comical way.

Highflyer started last spring break when a group of ACU students saw the Honduran people’s struggle to live a sustainable life.

The Honduran people make boots, belts and shirts but are not acquiring any income. Sanderson and Wentz thought it would be a good idea to create a Highflyer brand on a shirt with a little plane in the upper-right-hand corner, stating that person is a, “highflyer.” You may have seen students around campus wearing these shirts.

Sanderson and Wentz saw a need to give these people a passion for working toward the, “three G’s” in life, (Goal, Grit and Gain), a concept in their presentation. It starts out with a goal in life to work toward, the grit to persevere through and the gain you attain from it.

“It’s all about encouraging you, inspiring you and motivating you to get out and to do something great: to stop settling for whatever it is that you are doing now, and to get out and take risks,” Sanderson said.

“When you put on a Highflyer T-shirt you want to feel like you’re going to go out and accomplish something by going through the, ‘three G’s’ and at the same time you’re going to be helping the people in Honduras who can’t provide for themselves,” Wentz said.

To learn more about Emineo Art Gallery, visit http://www.emineoart.com/blogs/artistic-avenues.

To learn more about Highflyer, contact Matt Sanderson at mbs09b@acu.edu or Garrett Wentz at gdw09a@acu.edu.