After her success at impressing the Lincoln Dragons at last week’s “Perfect Pitch” competition, winner Sophie Bulgin explained that it all began with a visit from Gina Davies, the graduate enterprise intern at Enterprise@Lincoln.
Davies paid a visit to the business and marketing undergraduates, and it was then that Bulgin realised her current project gave her the perfect opportunity to enter Perfect Pitch:
“When Gina came to us and basically promoted the whole Deviate society and put forward the Perfect Pitch competition and prize, we realised that we were halfway there, as there was very little work for us to do to enter. It was a brilliant opportunity,” she says.
The twenty-two-year-old’s online business venture is called “Uni’d Books” and is designed to allow students to buy and sell their used course text books in a simple and hassle-free way:
“Students will be able to go onto the website and list their book and the condition it’s in, which will allow the website to generate a price for it. If the price is accepted, we will then take the book off the student’s hands by sending them a pre-paid mailbag in which they will send the book back to us.”
Bulgin herself has spent a fortune on university books, which was unnecessary given the amount of use they got, so she can sympathise with students who want to get some of their money back and has created her business as a way for students to do just that.
It’s now time for Bulgin to get started and make her business idea a reality. The next step for Uni’d Books is to begin to collect donated books to create an inventory:
“We are looking to generate an inventory so we can get the business off the ground, and we are turning to students past and present to donate books. We aim to build up an awareness of the company, highlighting to students that we are here for them,” she said, adding, “I didn’t have this facility and I want to push for students to be aware that this is here.”
Bulgin hopes to expand the business over the next decade, working with universities to make it a nationwide success: “In the next ten years I not only want to do it in university books, but in any type of second-hand book, and really expand this idea in as many markets as possible.”
If you would like to donate any second-hand text books, you can take them to the reception at the Enterprise@Lincoln building.