Sarah HendersonEditor’s Note: A previous version of this article should have reported that the Gillespie Award winners received $10,000, not $3,600.
The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship recently awarded seniors Tyler Moore and Jake Harrison the Gillespie Award, providing them a free space in Insight Park’s Innovation Hub for one year and $10,000 to develop their business pitch.
The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship recently awarded seniors Tyler Moore and Jake Harrison the Gillespie Award, providing them a free space in Insight Park’s Innovation Hub for one year and $10,000 to develop their business pitch.
Moore and Harrison developed their company, Move Fitness, to make a new type of fitness equipment for the Gillespie Business Plan Competition.
“It’s two sliding platforms, and between the two sliding platforms are two resistance bands, so basically you just slide against the resistance band,” Harrison, an exercise science major, said. “You’re targeting your thigh muscles and your butt muscles.”
Harrison said the pair got the idea to create the product when they were bored by the monotony of their daily workout routines.
“We just kind of developed more and more of it each week,” Harrison said.
Moore and Harrison are both from Corinth and have known each other since childhood.
“We grew up together, went to the same high school, played travel baseball together. We’re roommates,” Moore said.
The duo sees themselves as a well-balanced team because of their different majors and compatible personalities.
“Tyler tackles the business side really well, and I’m able to focus on the exercise portion,” Harrison said. “We couple together really well.”
Harrison said that winning the Gillespie Award gives their business an opportunity to grow.
“(Winning this award) gives us somewhere to actually work on our business, with the office space that provides and gives us money to make it to the next step, which is really what we needed at this point, because we need more money to get it out there on the market,” Harrison said.
Both Moore and Harrison said that they’re going to buy some inventory as well as a plastic mold to make their product cheaper with the money they won.
“It’s going to make it a lot cheaper to make it per unit, so we’ll be able to get the cost down some and we’ll have a lot better product than what we had,” Harrison said.
Moore and Harrison hope to start selling their product locally this August.
