Students expand their textbook business

A website created by a group of Richmond students for peers to buy and sell textbooks is expanding to include other campuses.

Sophomore Austin Butler, seniors Alex Eisenach, and Jackson Knox, and juniors Joe Harris and Lucas Stensby created Uhubb during the summer of 2010 to make it easier for University of Richmond students to buy and sell their used textbooks on campus.

"I first noticed the need for a way for students to buy and sell textbooks when my friends and I sold our books back at the end of our first semester freshman year," Butler said. "We were getting a fraction of what the books were worth and were not happy about it."

In March of last year, Butler teamed up with his friends and fraternity brothers to come up with an alternative to what he called "an unfortunate process."

"Uhubb derives its name from the group's idea that their website could become a place where buyers and sellers could come together, as a sort of 'hub' for the university," Butler said.

The website has already started to expand to other colleges and is being used by students at both Duke University and New York University, Butler said. It also has hopes of expanding to more schools in the coming year, including Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and Wake Forest, he said.

"One of my best friends from home is a part of a marketing club at Duke and was really excited to introduce UhuBB there," Eisenach said.

Not only is UhuBB expanding to other universities, but it is also expanding to include items other than books.

"As UhuBB developed, we wanted it to be more than just books," Knox said. "We wanted it to also be a place where seniors could sell their futons or refrigerators before they graduated."

Modeled after companies such as eBay and Craigslist, the group created the website with little experience in creating its own webpage.

"We essentially started from scratch," Eisenach said. "I bought a couple of textbooks and taught myself programming languages to make the website."

The group came up with ideas for the website and developed them into the UhuBB product using not only these programming textbooks, but also through their experiences both on-campus and in the workplace, Knox said.

"My classes taught me concepts, but UhuBB is giving me the hands-on experience," said Lucas Stensby, a Business Administration major and UhuBB's Director of Marketing.

Knox said that through his job at the admissions office, he learned about things such as brand management and the uses of social media as marketing strategies, which have translated to his work with UhuBB.

Joe Harris, a leadership major, gives credit to his leadership studies courses for providing him with the skills that he uses as the Director of Campus Expansion.

"Jepson has helped me by teaching me to see other people's perspectives, assess their needs and figure out a way to provide an answer for those needs," Harris said.

In the future, the UhuBB founders have ambitions of spreading the use of its website to colleges all along the East Coast and across the United States, Butler said. They hope to start marketing groups at other schools to show the student body how valuable a website like UhuBB can be to college students, he said.

"Being college students, we know how hard it can be to afford certain things," Harris said. "We know what it's like to always be checking your wallet and that's why we created UhuBB, for the benefit of the consumer."

Contact reporter James Riddick at jr.riddick@richmond.edu.