Thirty minutes before classes begin at Charlotte Latin School, a half-dozen seventh graders are hard at work in the McIntosh Leadership Center, printing stickers and collating them into packages. “Were there five ducks in a pack?” one student asks another.

They’re following through on a long-term project that was the culmination of their introductory Innovation and Design class during the 2023-24 school year. “One thing sixth graders love to do is make stickers,” says Nidhie Dhiman, Student Leadership Development Assistant and Middle School Innovation & Design Teacher. So she finished the class with an interdisciplinary group project that would reinforce students’ design and technical skills — crafting stickers and using the Silhouette Cameo 4 printer — while also teaching them some of the basics of the business world. 

All 120 sixth-grade students broke into teams; each team came up with a suite of stickers and a business plan for how they would sell them. That required both market research and a projected balance sheet. (Julia Walthall-Eisman, Middle School Educational Technologist, helped teach them how to set up profit-and-loss statements on spreadsheets.) After some coaching from Upper School members of the Debate Team, each sticker team then presented their proposals to an expert panel of Latin faculty and staff, in the style of the tv show Shark Tank.

Dhiman has an entrepreneurial background herself. “I’ve owned businesses pretty much my whole life,” she says. Her first work experience was at her parents’ business, a T-shirt store in a shopping mall in Round Rock, TX. She’s also owned a maternity/baby boutique in Charlotte called Baby Elan — and she still maintains a small-business accounting company in her off hours. “When I started working at Latin full-time, I pulled back on my number of clients,” she says, “but the ones who have been with me since the beginning, we’re now going on ten years working together.”

A panel of judges picked a winning team from each of six Innovation and Design classes — except that with two classes, they declared a tie, meaning that there were eight winning designs in total. Those eight sticker packages had a variety of price points, ranging from $2.50 to $6, and encompassed “duckicorns” (unicorn-duck hybrids), the wonders of the world, beach images, “dad jokes,” “The 7 Wonders of School,” images of nature, “Save the Turtles,” and a Ritz cracker box redesigned with the slang term “Rizz.”

This fall, all eight sets of stickers went on sale — and the entire class of 2030 has been pitching in to fulfill orders. Providing some extra motivation: all profits (after a promised donation to a local turtle charity) go to a fund benefiting the class, to be applied to a field trip and/or a pizza party. 

“I’m not their teacher anymore,” Dhiman says. “They’re not getting a grade for it. The money is not going into their individual pockets. But when we get orders and I put out the call saying that I need people to come in help? If I need 12 on a particular day, then 16 sign up. Every day, they see me in the hallway and ask how much we’ve earned — I share the spreadsheet with them that shows the revenues and the costs.”

So far, the sticker project has netted over $800; the stickers will stay on sale at this link through November 11. Dhiman cheerfully explains, “We have to close it down at some point because the whole cycle starts up the following year.”

And what have those early-morning seventh graders taken away from their first steps into the business world?

“I’ve learned to be more organized,” one said. 

Another reflected, “There’s a lot that goes into running a successful sticker shop.”