Coffee Catz, an on-campus coffee delivery system, has been talked about on social media for the past week and has the potential to become a real, on-campus business.
Coffee Catz was originally just an idea created by a group of students for their business class, Management Information Systems. The project was initially created to show the power social media can have for new and upcoming businesses.
The group of creators consists of three students: Bailey Thomas, junior marketing and finance major from Lubbock, Cameron Bonifant, junior management major from Keller, and Hayden Free, junior marketing major from Midland.
Free came up with the plan when the group was trying to brainstorm a good idea to turn in that would capture the attention of students. The name that stuck was Coffee Catz.
After some collaboration, the group came up with a marketing plan and began advertising via social media. They created a Facebook account as their home page and a Twitter and Instagram account to use as booster sites to direct people to their Facebook page for more information.
The project’s goal of showing how fast social media can spread an idea was accomplished. Students quickly caught word of Coffee Catz with great interest.
These social media sites drew many students to the business idea and reached many other business majors by word of mouth. However, it did not reach the rest of the ACU population.
“Coffee Catz is just a class assignment,” Thomas said. “But if it gets enough publicity and a lot of students want it, we could actually get it running.”
Due to its high exposure, the project can be seen as an opportunity for the group to create an actual business.
“There have been situations when our professor has done this project, at least one business gets started off of an idea,” Thomas said. “We are going to be working out all the small details and hopefully at the end of the class, Coffee Catz will be a real business available to students.”
Some of these details include price, form of payment, location of delivery and a strong operating system.
Thomas, Bonifant and Free are creating surveys that will be emailed to students. The surveys will collect data that will be used to address these small details and see if Coffee Catz is something that those on campus are interested in.
“If they could find a way to use our Bean Bucks to pay for it, that would be really cool,” said Lakin Carpenter, sophomore kinesiology major from Austin. “I would definitely pay a little extra to have my coffee delivered.”
