Stock X and GOAT are just some of the apps that in today’s day and age have acted as a portal into the more unconventional ways of starting a business amongst the youth of America.

“I remember many years ago, students talked to me about selling things on ebay and they said they could make more doing that than having an $8 an hour job. Now I think what I hear more than anything is not so much starting a business, but it’s flipping name brand clothing like Supreme clothing or shoes and then reselling that for more profit,” Darren Rothermel, business teacher, said. “I think you hear more from students of that, it’s not really a structured business where you have a plan or invention that leads to something long term. I don’t want to say it’s a ‘get rich quick’ concept, but it’s taking money and purchasing something and flipping it for more.”

One of the students who has gotten involved in the buying and reselling business of shoes is Ryan Derousse, junior.

“It first started when I bought a Supreme sweatshirt with some bad words on it and my mom told me that I couldn’t keep it so I had to sell it and then made probably like 250 dollars off it so then I realized oh, you can make a lil bit doing this, so that’s how that started,” Derousse said. “If you just want to make 300 or 400 dollars quick, you can just buy something and sell it quickly. There are some people who have businesses, but if you want to be professional about it you can be professional. Some people [even] do it as a living.”

Having a better off socioeconomic status, according to Derousse, helps kids have more opportunities buying and reselling products in this industry.

“Younger kids now have the money resource to buy these expensive things and their parents help them out a lot. I’m not saying that I buy every single one of my shoes like my parents do help me in some cases but when it’s in a 500-600 dollar range, I bought. Kids get into it and it’s almost addicting because you get a new shoe and then you see someone else with another one and then you want that one too. If you look at any of the soles on my shoes, they are beat as hell,” Derousse said. “It’s a culture that feeds off of each other so if you don’t buy the latest thing, people think that you’re lame or think your not caught up. You’ve gotta stay caught up which is a part of the addicting [aspect].”

The easy access the Internet provides an in into the world of buying and selling, but according to Rothermel, the success of a student in the business world varies from student to student.

“It depends on the individual student and their family just as far as the risk they are willing to take as well as degree of financial backing the parents are willing to provide whether it be through crowdsourcing or individual family members. So it always depends on the individual student,” Rothermel said.

Kaylee Buckley, senior, is one of the students whose family was willing to take the risk to invest in her new business idea.

“My dad’s brother is an entrepreneur himself, so he creates products all the time, so my dad took [my business idea] to him and he came up with a bunch of other ideas to go off. My dad is a financial advisor and is willing to put down money for the patents and willing to help me as much as he can because he sees that I am taking [my business] very seriously,” Buckley said. “He knows how much I’ve struggled so the idea of helping someone with my sickness in the future would be a dream come true for the both of us.”

Buckley suffers from Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), which causes her blood pressure to lower and results in her fainting a lot. Even though Buckley is a newcomer to the business world, she says that her business plan is based on creating products to help those with problems similar to her own.

“I knew that I wanted to start a business because of the way I see the world and with my sickness, there aren’t a lot of products designed for me but there are so many people with my sickness that I felt I had to create those people,” Buckley said. “I definitely have no idea what the hell I’m doing. I’m  just kind of going off of classes I’ve taken like entrepreneurship here, marketing, Intro to Business. But that is about where my knowledge begins and ends.”