4
ACTION
In December,
Ad Age
featured the entre-
preneurship of SPS student Max Baron ’17,
of New York City. Less than a year ago,
Baron, now 17, founded PrepReps, a com-
pany that connects high school and college
students with brands seeking the customer
loyalty of the next generation.
After spending more than a year work-
ing on the idea, PrepReps took shape over
the summer between his Fourth and Fifth
Form years. The company assesses its
student reps based on their social net-
working potential (followers) through an
application process, and connects them
with companies looking for brand repre-
sentation and modernized on-campus
marketing solutions. The idea is to pro-
vide advertising for companies and their
products in an organic way, offering an
alternative to what Baron calls “more anti-
quated forms of marketing,” including
sidebar ads on social media. Brands provide
student representatives with products to
wear around campus and post about on
social media. In short, the reps are provid-
ing a live, home-grown advertising solution
based on their individual social networks.
“Campuses, including St. Paul’s,” says
Baron, “are incredibly connected com-
munities, and that quality makes them
extremely lucrative for brands. By put-
ting clothing and apparel on influential
members of the community, we put the
product right in front of the consumer.”
Baron told
Ad Age
that he conceived
PrepReps from an already solvent industry
of youth brand representatives, combined
with his idea of becoming the third party
in which we will be able to generate the
most influence for our client through the
use of campus reps.” The company follows
up by monitoring the success of each and
every representative.
Since signing on with its first client,
PrepReps has made more than $40,000 in
revenue from its dozen customers and a
database of 2,500 students from 500 dif-
ferent campuses around the country. “In
its most simple form, we take the difficulty
out of finding brand ambassadors for our
clients,” Baron explains. The reps, adds
Baron, pay nothing to be associated with
PrepReps, while the clients pay for data-
base management plus the rep recruitment
and application review processes.
The biggest success so far for Baron
came in the initial four months with his
company’s biggest client, as PrepReps
was able to generate more than 1,000
Instagram posts for the brand through
nearly 130 reps.
“Collectively,” wrote
Ad Age
, citing
Baron “[PrepReps has] a combined social
following of just under one million people.”
The Fifth Former, who runs PrepReps
out of his Drury dorm room, has always
possessed an entrepreneurial spirit. One
summer, while still in middle school, he
sold weekly cookie subscriptions through
an online site, reaching $5,000 in sales.
DORM ENTREPRENEUR
|
Max Baron ’17
“Campuses, including
St. Paul’s, are incredibly
connected communities,
and that quality makes
them extremely lucrative
for brands. By putting
clothing and apparel on
influential members
of the community, we put
the product right in front
of the consumer.”
– Max Baron ’17, PrepReps
to vet the students applying for those
openings. PrepReps, according to its web-
site, evaluates each brand and targets
“the age group and geographic region
COURTESY MAX BARON ’17
