LovePop Partnership & Curriculum, 2014 – 2016

Since its start, TPZ has had ambitions of generating revenue through applied, entrepreneurial student work, providing more authentic learning while helping to sustain the organization. As an educator, I wanted to teach my students professional CAD to provide context for the math they were learning in school and help develop their resumes. To this end I cultivated a partnership with LovePop cards, a local startup energized by TPZ’s mission. Together we imagined students designing and pitching functional popup prototypes to LovePop for possible inclusion into their product line. With LovePop’s feedback, I developed and taught a recurring 30-hour curriculum introducing students to CAD and rapid prototyping, and I recruited and coached a team of volunteer engineers to facilitate individualized instruction. Over the course of this partnership six student card designs were further developed and brought to market. 

Below: my student Brian pitches his winning airplane card design to LovePop. He has since received over $10,000 in royalties ($1 for every card sold).

Fueled by the success of our retail partnership, in 2016 The Possible Zone furthered its collaboration with LovePop – branded as LovePossible – to design and manage custom projects for LovePop clients. We handled client interaction, design, prototyping, and coordination with LovePop’s manufacturing facility in Vietnam, and we integrated our students and alums in this enterprise as associate designers and later as project leads. In addition to acting as a designer for select projects, I served as a design coach for our LovePossible team. In 2016 LovePossible generated over $160,000 in revenue, enabling us to competitively compensate our youth design team for their work. Past clients include Turner Construction, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Cisco, LA 2024, Moen, and Arizona State University.