Isaac Avant ’20 All or Nothing – The summer of 2017 was great to say the least. When was enrolled into Wabash College I got accepted into a program called the Wabash Liberal Arts Immersion Program. In addition to learning great writing skills, making new connections, and getting a sneak peek at the year that was to come, this program came with an opportunity to build work experience the following summer. This experience came in the form of a paid internship.
When the time came, I was blessed with the opportunity to intern with All or Nothing, LLC. which has now moved to Florida, but was based in Indianapolis while I was there. While I was there I got the opportunity to learn from Dontae Fennell, the company’s owner. During my short time with the company I learned how to make my own designs on the software program, CorelDraw. I plan to own my own fashion company one day and this was a huge step towards that goal. After the design was made I learned how translate the design from the computer to a t shirt or any other article of clothing with the use of heat transfer vinyl. Within the first two weeks I was able to produce some of my own designs on shirts while helping Dontae with some of the orders he had.
Each day I became more familiar with the programming and my progress began to show. Towards the end of the internship I came up with a design that had my hometown’s nickname, Naptown, on it. Just to show my friends what I’d been doing all summer I posted the picture of the shirt on Twitter and it got over 400 retweets and over 1,000 likes. After that, I asked Dontae how much all the equipment costs to make the shirts and he provided the information to me. From that day forward I started to mass produce the shirts and sell them to people that were interested. Following that, I decided to get ahead and start on my fashion line now.
This summer I learned how to conduct business, how to network with like-minded people, and how to make my ideas come to life. I would like to thank the Mellon Grant for making this possible and helping me kickstart my career at such an early age. I also would like to thank Wabash College for the opportunity to join the immersion program last summer.
