Getting Unruled

Farley students turned a simple idea for unlined notebooks into a thriving business, Unruled, with a sustainable twist.

When engineering students Jacob Morgan (’18) and Bennett Hensey (’19) enrolled in the Farley Center’s Principles of Entrepreneurship course in fall 2016, they found themselves in the minority. 

The course tasked student teams with creating a theoretical business, giving them a chance to develop a business model and a marketing plan. Most of the other students in the class came up with grand ideas that could change the world but would be difficult to implement in practice. 

But Morgan, Hensey, and their teammates took a different tack. Instead of dreaming big, they thought small. What product could they design and sell to college students—not just theoretically, but on the Northwestern campus?  

After interviewing their friends in STEM disciplines, they found an unusual unmet need: a notebook without rule lines. Nobody liked to write on the lines of regular college notebooks, it seemed, but they couldn’t find alternatives. Sketchbook paper, for example, was too thick and heavy for notes. A search on Amazon was fruitless. “Students were taking printer paper, punching holes in it, and binding it themselves,” Morgan said.  

So the team built a prototype and presented their business idea: a sustainably manufactured notebook for college students that didn’t have any rule lines. They were met with skepticism. 

“I wasn’t sure it was that great of an idea,” said the course’s professor Verinder Syal, who formerly taught at the Farley Center. “Then I started searching on the web, and I couldn’t find anything like it. And by the end of the term, I said, ‘To my surprise, you actually have created something unique, and that’s great.’”  

The team, which also included students Christina Allen Nisell (’17; KSM ’23) and Ellen Ehrsam (’17), rode the momentum from their final presentation and became residents in The Garage, launching their business named Unruled. A Kickstarter campaign in February 2017 raised $6,000 for their first manufacturing run of spiral notebooks made from sustainable materials.  

By April they were lugging notebooks across campus to their space at The Garage to begin fulfilling orders by hand. Each notebook was sent out with a hand-written thank you note. “We always made sure to have a personal touch,” Hensey said. “We cared a lot about customer experience.”  

That summer, the team participated in Jumpstart (formerly called Wildfire), The Garage’s summer accelerator program. “We had a great experience in The Garage,” Morgan said. In the Jumpstart program, a mentor suggested that they should set a goal of selling out their inventory. The team went door to door to businesses in Evanston and ended up selling out within a week.  

The team also took another Farley class, Radical Entrepreneurship, and learned about management methodologies. “We leapfrogged ahead in terms operations because of these classes and programs,” Morgan said. 

Still, they knew they had to find a bigger market, so they began selling their products on Amazon in fall 2017. They brought on engineering student Kripa Guha (’19), who focused on marketing and masterminded partnerships with influencers on Instagram. “Now that we had these starred reviews on Amazon, we wanted to keep the momentum going,” she said. The team also focused on marketing the notebook’s sustainable aspects: covers were made from 100 percent post-consumer recycled content, and the inside paper was 30 percent recycled content. The business gave a portion of their profits to One Tree Planted’s global reforestation program. 

“There is a negative stigma that notebooks are made from a block of wood,” Hensey said. “With these partnerships, we became net-tree positive. We wanted our notebooks to be seen as something that you can carry around and feel good about.” 

As students, the team members took as many Farley Center courses as they could, including a Leadership and Ethics course with Syal. “He has been a wonderful mentor,” Morgan said. “His classes really allowed me to think about what leadership is and what kind of team I wanted to be on.” Both Morgan and Hensey created their own engineering degrees around product design and entrepreneurship. 

In 2019, Unruled partnered with Roaring Springs Paper Products, which helped get their products into bookstores across the country. Negotiating the deal gave the team “confidence in our ability to tackle ambiguous things with adults,” Hensey said. As team members graduated and got full-time jobs, they worked on Unruled on the side, making all decisions as a team. 

“It was always more important to us that we were better friends than business partners,” Morgan said. “We were all very much learning throughout this.” 

After launching four new products in 2021, the team decided that they had done what they could with the business and that it was time to close the journey. They wanted Unruled notebooks to stay available on the market, so this year they sold the business to Roaring Springs.  

Though they did not make “retire-early” money from the sale, they are excited about what opportunities may come their way next. And their previous mentors are proud of how they remained passionate about their idea.   

“These kids just took it and made something out of it,” Syal said. “I admire them enormously for their persistence.”