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BREWING SUCCESS COFFEE STARTUP HELPS TRAIN YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS ANNIKA TOMLIN • COLLEGE TIMES
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SU’s renowned business program has yielded yet another coup. Brewbike, a coffee startup that empowers college students by providing hands-on entrepreneurial experience and brews, recently expanded to 11 universities, including ASU. “Honestly, ASU had been a target (location) for us since we started Brewbike,” CEO Sierra Bloodgood says. “It’s in our area in the Southwest, and it has a great business program. “We’ve been looking at ASU for a while, and it’s very hard to be able to get on college campuses, so we started our conversation with ASU years ago. These conversations typically take a long time, but there was an opportunity to launch in Durham Hall as the building was getting renovated, and now we are at Durham Hall.” Durham Hall is on ASU’s Tempe campus next to the Old Main building.
Founded in 2015 by Northwestern University students, Brewbike is a student-led business with the objective of changing the game for future leaders, Bloodgood says. “We equip students, we equip young people with the skills that they need to run a business as we give them a seat at the table,” Bloodgood says. “We think that young people do have the ability to successfully run a business. We use this as an opportunity to boost each other up and to bolster our business while we truly create the building blocks for the better future of young people.” Bloodgood and her team hire each college’s leadership team from chief executive officer to chief marketing officer and chief people officer as well as the front house manager. From there, the CEO and other leadership staff partner with Brewbike to hire the baristas and the rest of what Bloodgood calls “the brewcrew.”
“We launch student-run coffee shops at college campuses around the country,” Bloodgood says. “The whole goal is to turn students into leaders. “Essentially what we do is we go to college campuses and we find students who want to be entrepreneurs and then we empower them with the skills that they need to launch their own businesses. These students are truly at the core of everything that we do at Brewbike.” Bloodgood learned about Brewbike while attending the University of Texas in Austin. After learning about the business model, Brewbike
reached out to Bloodgood to see if she wanted to come on board as the chief marketing officer. Prior to Brewbike, she was the vice president of marketing at Guinn Partners with prior stops at C3 Present and Box.com. “I started at Brewbike as the CMO, and it was right at the beginning of COVID as we were closing down all of our shops and we were launching our direct-toconsumer brands,” Bloodgood says. “That was my main focus for those few months that we were not on campus during COVID.” During this time, Brewbike rebranded with a new website
GrowTheBrains.com This publication was made possible by SAMSHA Grant number 6B08TI083044-01. The views expressed in these materials do not necessarily reflect the official policies or contractual requirements of the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) or the Department of Health and Human Services; nor does mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
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9/16/21 7:34 PM
