OXFORD, Miss. – Three Ole Miss sophomores are taking a familiar frustration of college nightlife and turning it into a business.
CoverStock, founded by Bobby Camp, Graham Thomas and Brown Logan, is a new app that allows customers to purchase bar covers in advance and, if their plans change, resell those covers rather than simply losing the money.
The idea grew out of the founders’ own experiences as freshmen at Ole Miss.
“It started from our own experience going out as freshmen,” Camp said. “We kept running into the same problem. You’d pay for a cover, then plans would change, a friend group would decide to go somewhere else, and that money was just gone. No way to get it back or hand it off to someone else.”
The students soon realized the problem affected businesses as well.
“On the flip side, we realized bars were losing out too,” Camp said. “Every no-show was a customer who wasn’t there buying drinks. We figured there had to be a better way to handle both sides of that.”
Camp and Thomas are both sophomores from Dallas studying business management at Ole Miss. Their third co-founder, Logan, is a sophomore from Charleston, Missouri, studying chemical engineering in the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. The three are also fraternity brothers in Phi Delta Theta.
Buying and Reselling a Cover
The concept behind CoverStock is relatively simple. Customers can use the app to purchase admission to a participating bar ahead of time.
The unusual part comes when those plans change.
Rather than losing the money spent on admission, a CoverStock user can put the cover back up for sale and set the price he or she is willing to accept.
For students, Camp said, that means avoiding wasted money on covers they ultimately don’t use. For participating businesses, the founders believe the system can help turn a no-show into a customer who actually walks through the door.
CoverStock isn’t just an idea waiting for a future launch. The service is already operating in Oxford.
Donut Distillery is currently using CoverStock, according to Camp, and the founders say additional Oxford venues are in the pipeline.
Starting in Oxford, Then the SEC
Oxford is intended to be the proving ground rather than the final destination for the company.
“Oxford is the foundation. This is where we’re proving the model,” Camp said. “From there, the plan is to expand to SEC schools over the next year.”
Building a startup while attending Ole Miss also means the three founders have had to figure out how to fit a new company around classes and college life.
They deliberately used the time before the fall semester to get much of the initial work completed.
“We made sure to get the groundwork done before the semester started, which has made it a lot easier to balance school, work, and friends now that classes are underway,” Camp said.
For now, CoverStock’s bigger ambitions begin close to home. Its first test is whether three Ole Miss students can take a problem they encountered during nights out in Oxford and turn their solution into something other college towns will want too.
