Ishaan Jain
Jain sells a lot of shoes from his college dorm room.
- Ishaan Jain is a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he runs a successful sneaker resale business.
- The 19-year-old, who said he made around $400,000 in sneaker sales since he started seriously reselling in 2015, applied to UNC because of its stellar business program and its vibrant sneaker culture.
- Jain's college application largely focused on his experience with sneakers and his resale business.
- Here's how he leveraged his experience to help him get into college and became a major reseller on campus.
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is known for its massive sneaker culture. Perhaps it's because Michael Jordan went there in the early 1980s or because of the school's close relationship with Nike.
For whatever the reason, the campus of over 19,000 undergraduate students is dominated by sneaker culture.
Ishaan Jain, now a freshman at UNC, said he knew he wanted to apply there because of the university's stellar business school. But another impetus for applying was the school's sneaker culture.
"I would say that's one of the main reasons I applied," Jain said of the sneaker obsession at UNC, where he is currently studying business administration. "And I think that's definitely a huge factor that helped me get in. Just the fact that my whole college application, a large part of it, was about my sneaker experiences growing up, my whole sneaker business and all of that."
Jain ran a successful sneaker resale business as a high schooler. He started reselling sneakers seriously in 2015, mostly through GOAT, an online sneaker marketplace. After making some mistakes in the early days of his business, Jain did about $325,000 in sales in his peak period, between September 2017 and March 2019. To date, he estimates he has done close to $400,000 in sales.
Now in college, Jain still runs his business from his dorm room, though he said it has slowed down since his time in high school. Even so, he said that half of his business now comes from selling to different college students on campus.
Here's how a high schooler who made six figures selling sneakers leveraged his business experience to help him get into college: