Rutgers pals team up to offer tasty alternative
Jordan Dermon and Albert Hermans played baseball together in the fourth grade. In high school they became close friends.
But it was not until they were classmates at Rutgers that they decided to try making money together.
Their business idea, born of personal experience, was simple enough: Rutgers students needed a new and improved way to order takeout. In 2007, after a year of laying the groundwork, they launched Scarletmenus.com, an online guide to New Brunswick restaurants and bars.
The enterprise started slowly, but took off the following year. Close to 7,000 users have clicked on Scarletmenus.com at least once to satisfy their cravings, according to Hermans, 20, a junior who’s majoring in economics. With every click, a fax line at a restaurant spits out an order. And a sales commission flows to the partners.
“We are turning a profit at this point. This has allowed us to pay fraternity dues and go out to eat ourselves once in a while,” he said. “We’re pretty happy.”
The story begins when the young entrepreneurs, both from Marlboro Township, were first-year students living in the dorms and finding themselves hungry and unhappy, despite having meal plans. This tended to happen on weekends.
“We’d get a lot of paper menus slipped under our doors, but it got to the point where we had so many, we couldn’t find the one we wanted,” said Dermon, also 20, a finance major. “When we did, we’d call in our order, and next thing you know we’d get veal parmigiana, instead of chicken parmigiana. We thought there had to be a better way.”
His business experience consisted of having worked at a summer camp. Hermans had worked for the owner of a martial arts school while in high school.
Their research turned up an online food resource developed by four Penn State students, who – it turned out – were eager to franchise their template.
“So we had the technology. Now we needed to do marketing, to sell restaurants on the idea,” Dermon said. They also had to pool their resources: savings from summer jobs, and a little help from their parents. Start-up costs, which covered fees and promotional items like pens and magnets, were around $15,000 according to Hermans.
That summer, the partners spent 12 hours a day pitching their business plan to restaurant owners in person, not in business attire but wearing Rutgers shirts. Some of the owners were not exactly bowled over, Dermon said.
Scarletmenus.com has 750 customers during the week and 1,000 on the weekends
“They were like, ‘Who are these two kids?’ ” he said.
New Brunswick restaurateur Anthony Panico was one of the first to sign up.
“What I liked about them was, they knew the pulse of the community,” said Panico, who owns a Panico’s and Panico’s Brick Oven Pizza on Church Street. “These kids were there; they were breathing it. They knew what students wanted."
Dermon and Harmons also worked the dorms and off-campus housing, putting up flyers and talking themselves hoarse.
Their website kicked off in the fall of 2007. It listed every restaurant in New Brunswick, including ones with traditional telephone-only service.
By 2008 Scarletmenus.com had enough traffic to begin selling advertising. The partners also hired advertising interns to blanket the campus with free merchandise promoting the business. The number of users – the majority of customers students but also some Rutgers faculty and staff – grew to about 750 during the week and 1,000 on the weekends.
These days Dermon and Hermans work from laptops in their fraternity house, Alpha Epsilon Pi. Each devotes between six and 10 hours a week to growing Scarletmenus.com.
“Al is more of the marketing guy; I’m more of the sales guy,” said Dermon.
This summer, they hope to expand the business by breaking into catering. They’d also like to extend their reach beyond Rutgers and build a customer base within the business community.
When they graduate next year, neither can imagine leaving Scarletmenus.com behind.
“Jordan and I have basically come to the conclusion that this should always be ours,” Hermans said. “We’re really, really proud of it. We still have a year-and-a-half left to decide what will happen.”