Midterm masquerades as spooky pop-up shop

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When most students think of midterms, they think of sitting at a desk taking a test — not trying to run a Halloween pop-up shop. But that’s exactly what professor Tim Flood assigned the students in UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s Flash Entrepreneurship course.

Taking over The Pitch event space on West Franklin Street, the class opened the Heel-O-Ween store in the days leading up to Halloween. The store has an assortment of costumes and masks — everything a customer might need for the spooky season. All profits from the store will be put toward Hurricane Helene relief efforts.

For the students involved, the process to get the store up and running was just as intense as any other academic project.

“To put this together, we’ve all been separated into different teams,” said senior Erin Newton. “I’m on the social media marketing team. My experience has just been to help spread the word on social media and start networking with other people. But certain platforms have really been more difficult to navigate than others.”

The store was located in The Pitch venue on West Franklin Street. (Rob Holliday/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Whether it was through online marketing, passing out flyers or stocking the event space with decor and Halloween merchandise, every participant student gained hands-on experience on how to operate a limited-time business.

Another student, Autumn Jones, worked with the operations team and had to navigate scheduling for her fellow students. It’s a role that she says made her more sympathetic to managers she’s had in the past.

“I have to make sure everyone has the same number of shifts,” Jones said. “This could prove to be pretty difficult since you have to take other midterms and fall break into account.”

Facing logistical challenges like these is exactly what Flood wanted for his students. The course, created in tandem with local business owner and Carolina alum Mike Griffin ’87, is focused on how to run a short-term business successfully. With so many pop-up shops emerging for holidays like Halloween and Christmas, Flood felt this was an underdiscussed topic in business academics. He saw a perfect opportunity for a hands-on learning experience.

“I’ve been teaching for over 20 years, and with this class I wanted to kind of reverse engineer both the teaching and the learning,” Flood said. “We thought these projects would be great because these business students might run into challenges like scheduling. Now they can say, ‘Hey, remember what we did when we faced this problem during our midterm?’ and can use this experience to help them out with situations in the future.”

Students in a UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School entrepreneurship class opened a pop-up Halloween store in The Pitch venue on Franklin Street. (Submitted photo)

Students like Annabel Dougherty feel this experience is something she can take into her future career in a way that’s far more beneficial than an average written test.

“This whole experience has been so eye-opening,” Dougherty said. “I want to be an entrepreneur, and seeing how it takes a dedicated team of 20 to 25 people to make something happen has been an incredible thing.”

For Flood, that camaraderie is something that he, too, has found the most moving about this experience. “It’s amazing seeing the students so energized,” Flood said. “This experience has made it so that there’s less separation between me, the teacher, or Mike, the alum, or them, the students. It’s an all-hands-on-deck event, and we’re all in it together — the Carolina Way.”