Will Hoogendyk IV, Campus Carrier sports editor
While many students at Berry balance athletics alongside academics, there are a select few who have yet another thing on their plate: a business. Addofo El Bey and Nile King are two students who run their own businesses in between schoolwork and exams.
Both Vikings started their respective businesses in high school and they have continued managing them into their college careers. El Bey, a defenseman on the men’s soccer team, runs ABC Studios out of Thomas Berry 204, his dorm room which doubles as a barbershop.
“I began my sophomore year of high school,” El Bey said. “I went to a boarding school called Shattuck St. Mary’s. I did free haircuts for a while until about senior year, and then I moved back to Atlanta and was able to start doing an apprenticeship back home.”
After returning from boarding school in Minnesota, he attended Birmingham-Southern College for his freshman year.
“I began my own business in college really,” El Bey said. “I stopped working at a barber shop so that allowed me to then go and market myself for the college students at Birmingham Southern.”
King has a simiar story to El Bey, starting his company Colossal when he was a junior at Union Grove High School in McDonough, Ga. King’s clothing company has done periodic drops of items from beanies to pants to shirts to hoodies. No matter what item he drops, he seeks to center them all around the same three goals.
“The first one is always to make sure that I have some type of appeal towards younger, more teenage audience to allow them to have more clothes that pertain to their interests,” King said. “My second detail is logic. A lot of times kids these days, we wear clothes that don’t really have meaning. I strive to make clothes that have something to make you think about or have a reason in mind [with] what you wear.”
King also seeks to make clothing catered towards taller audiences. While he still sells regular sized clothing, he noticed that the ‘big and tall’ clothing some companies advertise still struggles to fit. As a 6’5” freshman on the men’s basketball team, he knows this experience firsthand.
“Often times with tall people we’ll see name brands like Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas, have tall sections, but they never really fit tall people; they only fit a certain demographic of tall people,” King said. “I tried to make a brand where tall people of all kinds have a piece of clothing that they can rock, not some basic shirt. They have something that’s cool, that has a design, that has a story behind it.”
In his short time as a Viking, King has already noticed the difference a tight community like Berry’s can have on a small business. King had a booth at the fall market on Mountain Day which increased the word-of-mouth advertising about Colossal.
“You have one or two people that come to your brand and you don’t know how many friends that they have on campus,” King said. “They spread that to their friends and now you have random people walking up to you and knowing that ‘hey your the guy that owns that clothing brand right?’ and they see that people are wearing your brand so that brings more traction.”
El Bey, who also had a pop-up booth at the fall market, has also felt the impact of a close college community.
“I noticed a lot more growth on campus and amongst the students,” El Bey said. “At BSC it was a very small campus, but everybody was spread out still, and I was only a freshman, so it was weird for me trying to network and talk to people. That’s why I really like Berry because it has a lot of opportunity for young business owners and young entrepreneurs who have a good creative mind.”
One of the most well-known opportunities for young business owners at Berry is the Pitch competition: a Shark Tank-like event where students share their business model in an effort to win grants to fund their endeavors. This year’s Pitch competition is scheduled for April 15 at 7 p.m. where El Bey will present his plan for the future of ABC Studios.
“My hopes and plans are to get away from the day-to-day labor side and go towards the managerial side, and operations of owning a barbershop,” El Bey said. “Hopefully with earnings from the Pitch I could create my own barbershop. [I’m] pitching more of my business side of it, and then I want to incorporate [apprenticeships] because my goal is to franchise these barbershops. I want to begin out in Rome and then target the Kennesaw State, Kennesaw area next and see how far I can scale from there.”
Currently El Bey is cutting hair by himself in his dorm room but he wants teach his barbery skills to others and potentially turn it into a LifeWorks job.
“I’ve been talking to Philip Edge,” El Bey said. “He’s a director of the LifeWorks program, and he’s been influential in my decision-making process of how I want to structure the business when it’s being paired with the school. I want to start in Rome and offer a barber shop that has compatibility with Berry. Offer[ing] incoming Berry students and even current Berry students that may be barbers an opportunity to earn their master’s license in a year and a half to two years. From there, all they have to do is take their state board test and they’ll be certified. [Then] they’ll be able to practice as master barbers and earn their own income.”
El Bey has also been talking with Hardy Realty Group in Rome trying to get their owner and some investors to come and watch his presentation at the Pitch competition so they can see his vision for ABC Studio’s future.
Both King and El Bey spend a lot of time in the Campbell School of Business as they both have business related majors. El Bey is studying finance which has helped him organize the many small expenses involved with a hair cutting business, and King is double majoring in marketing and management.
“I feel my major’s helped me a lot,” King said. “As a marketing and management major, you got to make people get convinced to invest money in this product. It’s a matter of keeping ahead on your business and staying consistent with it and staying strong and that’s what it’s all about in the future.”
King sees the future of Colossal as more of an on the side thing than a full time gig.
“I do plan on getting a job but having Colossal as a side hustle for sure,” King said. “God-willing, if the brand’s still going [and] everyone’s still invested, I would love to keep making stuff. It also brings about the challenge of having to keep making stuff that’s unique and having to make different designs over time.”
King hopes to have his next drop ready by May and to keep working on new merchandise throughout the summer. King’s freshman year has been busy in between adjusting to college life in the fall and playing on the best men’s basketball team in Berry history in the spring. King scored a season high 14 points in Berry’s first round win against Guilford in the NCAA playoffs.
While the ABC in ABC Studios stands for Another Bad Creation as a joke, El Bey’s performance on the soccer pitch is anything but. He started 10 of the Viking’s 14 matches this year accumulating four shots and a goal from Berry’s back line.
For both El Bey and King it comes down to being the same person no matter where they are and spreading their passion for what they do.
“It’s all about making sure that I stay true to my core values,” King said. “Also trying to grow that following to see people relate to those core values.”