Many St. Thomas entrepreneurship students dream of one day owning their own company. But for some, their dream has already come true.

Lemonaid, a business started by sophomores Austin Nash, Matt Baloun and junior Brandon Kohler, was launched as part of their 200-level entrepreneurship course.

Although the project started with simply selling lemonade, it has grown into much more.

“In the beginning, we literally just bought lemonade, went door to door in the dorms and sold it to people,” Nash said.“Now we’ve moved on to T-shirts. We’re taking our logo, putting it onto T-shirts and selling it.”

Nash said the plan is to take whatever profits are made and microfinance it through Kiva, a non-profit organization that allows people to lend money through the Internet to microfinance institutions in developing countries. Loans and donations from its users and partnerships with businesses support Kiva.

The hope is that Lemonaid will connect entrepreneurs with investors through lending to alleviate poverty, Nash said.

Profits from the $20 T-shirts will be used to help budding entrepreneurs in developing countries finance their businesses.

“We were thinking of doing something creative. We all have crazy, kind of funny personalities, and we kind of wanted to bring that out in our business. So, we create these kind of funny graphics for the T-shirts and sell them,” Baloun said.

The group started with the concept of “It’s Just Lemonade,” but after re-evaluating, they rebranded, repositioned and renamed their company “Lemonaid” to represent their goals.

“‘It’s Just Lemonade’ represented kind of an idea of a college lifestyle, and that’s not what our business is about. Lemonaid is about entrepreneurship, and at its core, lemonade,” Nash said.

Nash, Baloun and Kohler credit their advisers, Jenna Breen and Jack Duffy, for their success and were able to help microfinance a business.

Their first micro-loan was $50 to a beauty salon.

“Kiva has this amazing payback rate. Because it’s a loan, it’s not like we’re giving away the money. We’re kind of entrusting and empowering them to use the money and then pay it back, just like any other business. Which is why we really love Kiva and the idea of microfinancing,” Nash said.

The group is also funding the UST Cup, the Entrepreneurship Society’s first improv business plan competition. Teams will have one hour to devise a business plan based on a topic given to them. Lemonaid has donated some of their profits to the $850 prize awarded to the competition winners.

“It’s stuff like that, that gets us excited and keeps us working,” Nash said. “We want to fund entrepreneurs through whatever we choose to do. It started out with lemonade, now it’s moving on to T-shirts and where it goes, we don’t know for sure. We just know we want to support entrepreneurs in whatever we’re doing.”

In addition, the team is working with designers to create more T-shirt designs. They have emailed designers nationwide to design T-shirts for the site.

“We’ve been getting responses,” Baloun said. “The eventual idea is to add various designs to Lemonaid from designers who agree with the concept and want to add to it.”

Amanda Ogbuehi can be reached at ogbu0322@stthomas.edu.