Blake Spiers took careful notes as a kid while watching his dad run various apparel companies.
He’s the son of clothing industry veteran Ivan Spiers, a savvy marketer who runs Irvine-based nZania LLC. The company owns or licenses several brands, including hip women’s clothing maker BB Dakota, Blue Cult and Andy Warhol for Levi’s. The company also handles production for Fly Industries LLC, maker of Black Flys sunglasses.
“Growing up around the garment industry with my father taught me a lot about identifying and reaching out to different markets,” Blake Spiers said.
Now he wants to use dad’s expertise, and a little of his money, to launch his own business targeted specifically to graduating high school students.
In June, shortly after he graduated from the University of Southern California, Spiers cofounded an online company called AskBeforeCollege LLC. The company’s main feature is a Web site, www.AskBeforeCollege.com, where high schoolers can ask college-related questions to current undergraduates at different universities.
Spiers’ dad helped fund the company. The Web site is housed at nZania, where Spiers and his two partners, David Lederman and Brian Hosokawa, oversee four other workers and get access to nZania’s accounting services and computers.
“The ability to share resources with my father’s company helped keep the startup costs to a bare minimum,” Spiers said.
The Web site centers around sharing information about schools, including sports, food and academics. People can post and answer questions, take surveys and get news about the universities.
AskBeforeCollege.com is free for users.
“A college education is expensive enough,” Spiers said. “We didn’t want to add to this cost.”
Spiers said AskBeforeCollege.com will primarily bring in money through advertising on the site.
Advertisers can buy space on specific categories within the site, such as food or sports, and place banner ads there, Spiers said.
They’re not billed until their ads are seen, he added.
Plus, advertisers can customize their campaigns by state, county or specific campuses and select different demographics they want to reach, Spiers said.
Other services include letting advertisers promote special offers to different students, he said.
“While some companies may remain skeptical about the effectiveness of online advertising, we believe that most will see that placing their ads in front of only those students who are potential customers is the most cost effective way to advertise,” Spiers said. “We also closely monitor site traffic to ensure that our advertisers are truly getting what they pay for.”
Spiers said the company is “currently negotiating with several potential advertisers.”
Some 25% of advertising revenue raised on the site also will go to nonprofit groups that students pick, Spiers said.
AskBeforeCollege.com plans to keep its staff small. But Spiers said as the company grows he expects to hire some workers to help with Web development, design, marketing and advertising sales.
To get the word out about the site, AskBeforeCollege.com is working with university campus directors and guidance counselors, who are recruiting students to start answering questions on the site, Spiers said.
The company also is promoting itself to high schools, he said.
The biggest challenge so far is letting people know how the site works.
“The peer information network we created is a fairly new method of finding and sharing information between people,” Spiers said.
The site has so far gotten a few thousand students from more than 100 different schools to use it, he said.
