OneGreek, an app created by two UA alumni aimed at building a social network exclusively for members of Greek Life across the country, was purchased by the apparel company GroupThreads on Oct. 14.
Samuel Garst and Gavin Glatting launched the app nationally last November while still students at the UA. It was created with the idea to connect sorority and fraternity chapters across the country.
Garst and Glatting recently moved from Tucson to Austin in the hopes of growing their business. A month later, the two met GroupThreads, a custom apparel company specifically tailored to the Greek Life market earning around $1 million per year revenue just in Texas, according to Garst.
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After trying to negotiate marketing relationships in which the two companies could mutually benefit each other, Garst and Glatting realized that it would make more sense for GroupThreads to simply acquire oneGreek.
GroupThreads was trying to cover more of the Greek Life market, something that oneGreek was already successfully doing. Garst said that six months after the app’s launch, it had reached about 50 percent of the market with over 100,000 users at 450 campuses across the country with around 6,000 different chapters.
“Ultimately what it means for the future of oneGreek is that it is going to continue living on,” Garst said. “And under new management it will see changes to the application with hopefully exciting and new features and additional offerings with ways for Greeks to connect that larger social networks like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat just don’t have the capacity to create.”
Although oneGreek was the brainchild of Garst and Glatting, they had help along the way. Brayden Jackson, a management information systems junior joined the team in the beginning as one of 10 campus representatives for oneGreek. At the time, the idea of oneGreek was to be a Tinder-like recruitment platform, a concept that ultimately failed when Garst and Glatting released it in January of 2015.
Jackson, a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, stuck with the company until its successful re-launch 10 months later.
“I am extremely excited and proud of how far oneGreek has come and am so excited to see where it goes from here,” Jackson said. “After being acquired by a reputable company such as GroupThreads, their success will only continue to grow. I know these two companies will work together to further revolutionize Greek Life and bring it to the digital age.”
Sela Britton, a pre-business sophomore and member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority, began interning with Garst and Glatting in August 2015. She helped them collaborate with different design ideas and marketing strategies, and helped recruit ambassadors on different campuses across the country.
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“I’m so happy about the app’s recent acquisition,” Britton said. “Sam and Gavin started oneGreek from scratch almost entirely by themselves. Hundreds of thousands of [Greek members] were on the app in the first week of launch.”
Garst and Glatting no longer have any stake in the app since its sale other than as advisers. But Garst said he’s excited to see the name oneGreek live on, and hopes that it continues to provide relevance to the Greek community.
The evolution of oneGreek, from its earliest stage as just an idea in 2012 to its sale in 2016, has inspired both Garst and Glatting to pursue more ventures in the future.
“I think it’s a great story just to people that are aspiring entrepreneurs and want to build something that’s really possible,” Garst said. “You can fail plenty of times, you just got to keep moving and keep testing and figure out where the right path is and eventually you will succeed.”
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