Drushya Musham sees rice and thinks jewelry.
Yes, jewelry.
Charlie Edmonds teaches music, specifically school band and orchestra music, and recognizes a black-gospel void.
She fills it.
Such outside-the-box thinking has these student entrepreneurs reaping the benefits of a Shoebox Fund investment opportunity.
Musham, a junior international business and management major for the Kelley School of Business, started NiCE, which stands for Name on Rice. It’s a micro-art business that engraves messages on grains of rice and puts those grains into pendants, necklaces or bracelets to create customized jewelry.
Edmonds, a Ph.D. student in music education at the Jacobs School of Music, runs Pocket Methods LLC. It’s developing an app and a platform to let beginning school band and orchestra leaders tap into the rich heritage of black music stretching back 400 to 500 hundred years.
These ideas earned both Shoebox Fund investments. Edmonds will get $6,000; Musham will receive $4,000.
The fund, launched with a $60,000 gift from Donna and John Shoemaker in 2020, supports student startups from the Shoebox incubator within the Shoemaker Innovation Center at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering.The fund is administered by the Luddy School in partnership with IU Ventures, which leads IU’s investment in high-potential new venture opportunities with strong university connections.
“It’s intended to be educational, but it’s a real investment,” says Travis Brown, senior executive assistant dean of innovation, entrepreneurship and commercialization. “The money goes directly to the business, rather than to the student as a scholarship.”
Brown says the proposals from Edmonds and Musham stood out because of their clear understanding of their value proposition and who they hope to serve. They also understood how to make use of the investment and what the next steps would be for their business.
Musham calls the investment opportunity, “a huge boost in where I am and where I could be.”
“I have ideas rolling around in my head, and when you don’t have the capital to go forward, you’re just holding on to your dreams,” she says. “Now, I have the resources to achieve them.”
Edmonds says the entire Shoebox experience was “life changing.” The chance to pitch in front of an investment committee and to work around students engaged in entrepreneurship was something she’d never experienced as a student, or for six years as a middle school band and orchestra leader.
“At the Shoebox, everybody is working on solving a problem with their idea. It helped me see what it was like to be an entrepreneur. There were accountability meetings. People would ask, ‘When is that going to be done? When is the next milestone?’ I hadn’t been challenged in that way before.”
Beyond the fund, the Shoemaker Innovation Center provides student entrepreneurs and innovators the resources for business ideas to flourish and make dreams a reality. It was established in 2015 through a generous gift from John and Donna Shoemaker.
“I am really thankful for the resources and the legal services at Luddy and the Shoebox,” Edmonds says. “Having those around me has really helped.
“I don’t know if I’d have been able to develop this or get it off the ground without being part of the Shoebox.”
Every semester, three teams present to the Shoebox Fund Investment Committee. The Shoebox consists of 30 teams. Typically, five to 10 apply for an investment.
“How many that apply depends on where they are in the development process,” Brown says.
Over the years, teams and their ideas have improved.
“We’ve always had strong teams and had the ability to put our strongest teams in front of the committee,” Brown says. “As the Shoebox has gotten more mature, the teams have gotten stronger. They’re more focused and driven to develop their business. That results in a stronger pool to pick from.”
Brown adds that giving students the opportunity to present their ideas to the committee will help them “acclimate themselves to the pitch process when seeking venture capital.”
Shoebox Fund Investment Committee members Ellie Symes, Chaz Shelton and Adam Russek-Sobol all received investments for their business ideas during their student days through the BEST Competition that Brown directed. Symes is now the CEO of The Bee Corp., Shelton runs Merchant’s Garden, and Russek-Sobol is the founder and CEO of CareBand.
That experience, Brown said, made them ideal role models and mentors, which is why he asked them to serve on the committee.
“Our students need to learn how to manage the money,” Brown says. “Who better to coach and guide fledging student entrepreneurs than previous student entrepreneurs who have gone through our programs?”
What’s the stories behind the winning fund ideas?
Let’s take a look.
*****
How do you write a message on a grain of rice?
“Use a small pen and write really small,” Musham says with a smile. She should know. She does all the writing even though she says she’s legally blind.
It helps to have steady hands.
“I hold my breath when I do it,” she says. “Exhaling makes your hands tremble.”
She laughs.
“The medical industry is missing out. My hands are like surgical steady. It’s so precise.”
Messages can be phrases, such as Carpe Diem (Seize the Day) or Love You Forever. They can be cute, silly or a joke.
To help visibility, Musham adds a layer of baby oil to magnify the grain’s message.
Beyond jewelry, Musham puts rice grains on gift cards and photo albums.”
The idea came when she saw someone else writing on rice and figured she could do it better.
The goal is to market this to college students seeking a gift for a friend or mothers wanting family tree ornaments.
“It depends on the message you’re going for,” she says. “If you want silly, it’s usually for young people. If you’re going for something more emotional or sentimental, it’s families and moms.”
Musham says it takes about 30 seconds to write a message on a rice grain. She does that as well as all the marketing and product shipping.
“If I work on it eight hours a day, I can fill many orders. We’re not there yet,” she adds with a laugh.
In the end, it comes down to this:
“Our whole mission is to capture big moments in small capsules.”
*****
Edmonds saw a big music need.
Enter Pocket Methods LLC.
As a band director at a predominantly black middle school that lacked difference-making music resources, Edmonds had been writing arrangements for her students.
Many of her students didn’t think the music program was for them.
“I said, music is absolutely for you. I wanted to change things for them.”
Edmonds wanted to showcase music that represented her students by telling a “fuller story of black music from 400 to 500 years ago.” She wanted to use those genres, which had been missing from the curriculum, to teach those concepts.
“I wanted band directors and students from all sorts of demographics to be able to experience it,” she said.
In 2020, she went to the Jacobs School of Music for her Ph.D. The idea for what became Pocket Methods started there, but took off when she took it to the Luddy School and the Shoebox.
Her research centered on music from Africa and the pre-trans-Atlantic slave trade. She looked at West African rhythms, dances and chants; she studied how that made it to America and to places such as New Orleans where slaves worshipped and played instruments, and how it evolved into gospel music and, in the 20th Century, to Rosseta Tharpe, an American singer, songwriter and guitarist who Edmonds calls, “the mother of rock ‘n roll.
“You look at all the things that started with black people, at giving the credit and doing exercises where students experience it on their instruments.”
It also included great African American band leaders such as Frank Johnson in the 19th Century and James Reese in the 20th Century.
“In all these music history classes, their names don’t come up,” Edmonds says. “We’re doing better. We’re trying to find that information, but you have to want to find it. A big part of this platform is pulling those pieces out and giving that credit.”
Thanks to the Shoebox investment, Pocket Methods is an idea whose time has arrived.
“Every band director, orchestra director and music teacher I’ve talked to is so excited about this,” Edmonds says. “It really fills the gap. This is something most teachers have been waiting for.”
Edmonds says there’s the potential to get it into every classroom. There’s also a subscription model for individual learners, so if people are homeschooled or in after-school or church programs or church orchestras, they can sign up individually. It’s not just a classroom model.
“The potential is there for kids or a beginning learner to interact with fun, captivating music,” she says, “and learn where it came from and how it connects to what we do today.”