This past spring, Archmere Academy sophomore Shreyas Parab won $7,500 for his app Spell for Success when he placed first in the Diamond Challenge finals. At the time, he was also balancing launching a nonprofit in collaboration with Teach for America and operations at his first company, a novelty tie company called NovelTie.
If you recall, Parab said he stumbled into entrepreneurship.
“I decided to do something that made me cool with my friends and even the ladies,” he told us. “Turns out that the cool stuff I was doing was called ‘entrepreneurship.’”
Laugh if you’d like, but the teenager’s tie company just caught the attention of the world’s largest retailer.
Through his enrollment in the Youth Entrepreneurs Academy (YEA!), Parab was granted a a trip to the Sam’s Club/Walmart corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., meeting CEO Rosalind Brewer. Their first impression of Parab was solid enough to land him his own featured post on Walmart’s blog — and a pop-up store at his local Sam’s Club.
The date for the pop-up is TBD, but Parab said he’s eager to “turn the occasion of having to wear a tie to the event where you get to wear your NovelTie.”
Oh, and he made an appearance on FOX29 earlier this week. Check it out below.
Watch