How Did This Get Started?

Welcome To The Adventure Of A Lifetime

In 2012, I found myself jumping up and down when I received the news that I has been accepted into the Michigan Marching Band. I was stoked to begin the adventure of a lifetime.

I received a very nice message on Facebook from one of my future sections leaders, Chad Kitzinger. He welcome me into the band. We started talking about things we had in common. He was a current business major and I was aspiring to get into the business school (in fact, I was actively looking for someone to mentor me through that process!) Chad was involved in a research community during his freshman year and I was about to embark on the same program.

I thought to myself, "what a wonderful first interaction this is turning out to be." Little did I know that I would someday build an entire company inspired by that one conversation.

Opportunity Knocked!

In 2015, my band directors Dr. Pasquale and Dr. Brown were looking for a more effective way for the Michigan Marching Band to communicate with current and prospective band members.

Luckily, in between college classes, I was working for a marketing technology company called Shopwindow, which had capabilities that addressed many of the band's needs. Dr. Pasquale and Dr. Brown were kind enough to meet with me to hear out how Shopwindow could help the band communicate better.

Leap Of Faith

The Michigan Marching Band decided to give it a go as the first beta tester. I was very grateful for the confidence and trust that Dr. Pasquale and Dr. Brown put in me and my company.

The band's original objective in using the product was to send mass text messages to disseminate information to current students.

Very quickly into the process, they began to explore a variety of additional uses such as recruitment and communicating with their donor list.

"This is going to revolutionize the way college bands operate"

After 9 months of using the product, the Michigan Marching Band experienced stellar results. Dr. Pasquale encouraged the expansion of the product into other Big 10 band programs and offered to help Shopwindow get a booth set up at a College Band Directors National Conference event.

The company expanded into other band programs such as the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the Marching Illini of Illinois, and the Mighty Sound of Maryland. In collaboration with my boss, we decided to bet the entire company on the collegiate band industry. We became solely focused on helping band programs solve recruitment and marketing challenges that are unique to band programs.

Bandwindow was born. This wouldn't be our first renaming of the product...

In late 2017, after about 1.5 years of beta tests with our early adopter band programs, the Bandwindow operation was in full swing.

In this image, Bandwindow sponsoring the CBDNA Athletic Bands Symposium for the first time in 2018.

Can We Use This Throughout Our Entire Music School?!

After successfully implementing Bandwindow within 30 band programs, the most common piece of feedback we received that we had yet to address:

"Can we expand our usage of this product to our entire School of Music? I know that our orchestra and choir directors will love this and get a lot of use out of it!"

Goodbye Bandwindow. Hello Musicwindow!