Courtesy of Dave Spandorfer

A student sports a pair of shorts sold by Edele, a student business that sells running shorts. The business won a $15,000 prize in a competition.

A new business run by current University students, Edele, will be selling running shorts and donating a portion of their proceeds to charity. The business won a $15,000 prize in the Skandalaris Center’s YouthBridge Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition (SEIC) to get the business started.

The team of undergraduates performed well in the competition, which is typically dominated by graduates and community members. Edele won two of the seven prizes awarded this year.

According to Edele CEO Dave Spandorfer, a senior, it is the most money an undergraduate team has ever made in the competition.

Now the team hopes to use that money to effect a real international change.

The business will sell athletic shorts for $40—the same price that Nike sells its running shorts for, and $6 more than comparable shorts cost without the Nike logo. But rather than collecting the extra $6 cost as profit, the company plans to donate the money to organizations combating malnutrition in developing countries.

When Spandorfer and his friends on the cross-country team noticed that athletes pay $6 more for Nike shorts than non-name-brand shorts of similar quality, they came up with their business idea—to sell similar shorts and give the extra $6 to charity.

“Nike puts their money into athlete’s sponsorship and expensive marketing; our goal is to create a product where that money goes toward fighting something fundamental,” Spandorfer said.

Spandorfer said that tutoring underprivileged students from other countries gave the group an idea of how to specifically direct the funds.

“I had tutored refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, and got to know these people and their back stories,” Spandorfer said. “You have this idea of wanting to do good, this idea of helping all these people; and you feel so lucky as a runner to have access to clean water, and plenty of food. Being able to give back was really important to us.”

Beyond the company’s product, group members are working to ensure that the factory producing the shorts in Vietnam is socially conscious with its workers’ conditions.

“I think that it’s really clever,” said Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center and one of the competition’s judges. “It combines design, athletics, social consciousness—and it’s integrating it into this new blending of for-profit and not-for-profit thinking.”

According to Spandorfer, 97 stores in 27 states agreed to sell Edele’s product—including every running store in St. Louis. He noted that potential customers have responded positively as well.

“We asked 249 runners between the ages of 17 and 75, and 92 percent said they would be willing to pay more or would consider to pay more for a socially conscious product,” Spandorfer said. “And just from the people that we’ve talked to—we’ve been flabbergasted by the sort of response rate we’ve gotten.”

Spandorfer hopes that over time the company will expand beyond running shorts and into other sorts of running apparel.

Edele intends to use the $15,000 in grants to begin selling the shorts by February 2012.