CERTIFIED GOLD

The list of things that were expanded or improved with the construction of the new high school in Owatonna continues to grow.

The most recent success story is the Husky Hut, a small – but busy – store that achieved Gold Certification for the Owatonna DECA club.

It was one of 850 school-based enterprises (SBEs) across the nation that will be recognized in late April during DECA’s International Career Development Conference in Orlando, Fla.

The driving force behind the business is OHS seniors Alia Kubicek, Katrina Ethen, Darian Stransky and Seth Johnson, who worked on the certification for the first half of the school year.

“They had to write 50-page papers about certification,” said Brad Scharber, their DECA advisor. “They have to show the application to 10 different standards and five sub-standards for each one.”

The standards include financial analysis, operations, marketing, pricing, product management, selling and human resources.

“That’s no small task for high-schoolers,” Scharber said. “Having to talk about 10 standards and applying it to how our store works; then even splitting it in half for retail or food is a big deal.”

Further evidence of the students’ success was an appearance in the Top 12 of the state DECA competition earlier this month.

Kubicek and Ethen’s food services took first place. They will complete at the national conference, along with Stransky and Johnson’s retail portion of the operation.

Their business is a remarkable upgrade to the kiosk that operated at the former high school, and “once we got the storefront, (the school district) offered it as a class,” Kubicek said.

The class is where the four managers worked on the certification; this semester, they use their Independent Study option to continue to run the business.

All four have appreciated the hands-on experience and real-world learning.

“Being able to run the store is a cool experience,” Kubicek said, “especially being in high school.”

Stransky and Johnson have experienced being able to design clothing and test the waters of what sells in their retail operation.

“We had expectations of what things would sell better than others,” Johnson said.

The best-seller, they all agreed, are the DECA cookies.

“We fresh-bake them,” Ethen said. “We have an oven; we get the cookie dough from Hy-Vee, then we bake them during lunch.”

She and Kubicek introduced slushies on the food side of the Husky Hut this year, and also sell basic snacks, like granola bars and fruit strips, as well as juices, protein drinks and energy drinks – another big seller.

The retail operation offers two kinds of T-shirts, three different sweatshirts, sweatpants and two different kinds of hats.

Though the business is split, the group brainstorms about products and pricing, and collaborates on most other aspects.

“It’s kind of like a fundraiser for DECA, so all of the profit that we make goes either back into the school store or goes toward student fees for DECA,” Ethen said.

After expenses, the Husky Hut has brought in almost $12,000, Scharber said.

The store is open only during the lunch hour, about 11:20 a.m. to 1:20 p.m. on school days. It is staffed by students in the class, on a rotating basis.

It’s probably no surprise that the majority of sales come through the food service.

“It obviously goes over well,” Ethen said, “so we’re trying to even out the food and retail side. We’re trying to find different ways to market (the retail), or different deals to get students to buy the clothing.”

They are open during some sporting events at OHS, “where we try to sell it to the parents more,” she said.

The students talked a bit about their visit to Elk River last spring, known as one of the best SBEs in the state.

“They make like, $100,000 a year,” Stransky said.

That program has been around a while, and has significant community involvement – including a downtown storefront, Johnson said.

“As far as we go now is our online store,” Ethen said. “I don’t think we would ever open up an actual store downtown.”

So can it – should it – get bigger?

“I think what we have is good, but we do want to grow our online side of things, just to help with the retail side,” Ethen said. “We do offer shipping and pickup, so we’d like to grow that first, before we look beyond those things.”

The success they’ve had, she said, “is obviously the goal, and we worked pretty hard on it, but we weren’t expecting it to do as well as it did.”

That’s par for the course, Scharber said.

“They don’t even recognize how much they actually do,” he said. “I didn’t even do the online store – that was Katrina.

“It’ll be hard to replace them – they do a lot of good things.”