Entrepreneurs with a Conscience

eth Richardson (MBA ’08) started Zebra Crossings (www.zebracrossings.net), an online retailer selling fair-trade gifts made by artisans in South Africa, because she wanted to do something to relieve the country’s rampant unemployment. “I had experience in entrepreneurship but had never started a small business on my own. But we decided to start it and see how it went,” she said.

In business for a year, Zebra Crossings sells accessories such as handbags woven of recycled materials by people working from their homes.

The company has new, more focused plans for expanding, thanks to the Carolina Challenge, an entrepreneurial business plan competition that’s part of the Carolina Entrepreneurship Initiative. Zebra Crossings won first prize in the social category in the spring 2006 competition.

Zebra Crossings’ new plan focuses on multiple components of the wedding market, Richardson said. She plans to include gifts for bridesmaids or groomsmen, fair-trade wine and a wedding gift registry. “It would be another place for couples to register, but the gifts would be fair trade,” she said.

“Having the structure of writing the business plan, work shopping it and getting feedback from mentors was helpful,” said Richardson, who wants to pursue expansion of Zebra Crossings after she graduates. “The resources at UNC can help me with that, and my courses are filling in a lot of holes I had in terms of technical skills.”

About half of the businesses recruited for the Carolina Challenge are social ventures, said Ted Zoller, assistant professor and executive director of UNC Kenan-Flagler’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. “It’s a reflection of the culture at Carolina. I think we tend to attract the student who is committed to the advancement of society and committed to improving our world,” he said.

“We are helping students to apply lessons being developed in business – supply chain and value chain development, social networking – to social venturing,” Zoller said. “Once you teach a student to use these techniques, they move on to apply them to different problems.”