Entrepreneurship students senior Jacob Mischke, junior Tia Klaers and junior Jackson Buelow and senior mechanical engineering student Kyle Schneider won the top prize of the annual Business Plan Competition hosted by the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship in February on St. Thomas’ Minneapolis campus. The team’s Klip-N-Sip design and business plan won $10,000 in the university division.

The team has since renamed their company to VersAttach. The product is a bottle holder that attaches to bed frames. With many college students sleeping in lofted or bunked beds, Mischke recognized a need for a way to hold a water bottle in this setting.

“It’s a pretty simple product that you don’t have to think much about how to use it; it’s just a convenient way to hold your beverage,” Schneider said.

Team members Mischke and Buelow presented this product idea at the Fowler Business Concept Challenge last November and took third place. Fowler judge and Schulze School of Entrepreneurship donor, Ted Robb, invested in the team’s product after the initial competition.

With a new source of capital, the team was able to actualize their product concept and take it to the Schulze competition to compete against four other teams. Klaers joined the team after the Fowler competition.

“We’ve made a lot of progress since the Fowler business competition, and based on what we’ve done when we got a patent lawyer, we felt ready to create a business plan and compete with that,” Mischke said.

The team used St. Thomas facilities and resources to construct their bottle attachment prototype. Early stages of prototyping occurred in the university’s create space and then later moved to South Campus’ engineering labs to 3D-print the product using a handcrafted Resin cast mold.

Using his engineering background, Schneider led the team’s product design, but every member of the team brought unique skills to the business plan.

“We have a good balance in our team,” Klaers said. “We’ve all kind of found our niche in the company…I feel like the four of us came together really well and we’re super proud of everything we bring to the table together.”

Each member put their winnings back into the business. The business plan is now launching into the sales stage in which the team hopes to sell directly to colleges in bulk rather than by unit.

“We’re having a ton of fun with it. No matter what happens with the business, this is an amazing experience for all of us,” Klaers said.

Tina O’Malley can be reached at omal4989@stthomas.edu.