Hidden Gems: Meet Madeleine Nicklaus and Emma Sullivan of CoCo Linked

Today we’d like to introduce you to Madeleine Nicklaus and Emma Sullivan.

Hi Madeleine and Emma, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Our story begins three days before the start of our freshman year of college at the University of Kansas. Emma is from a town in Wisconsin and Madeleine is from Wichita, KS; we had never heard of one another before. It was the last day of sorority recruitment when we met at a mandatory meeting of all incoming freshmen at Allen Fieldhouse. We sat in the same section with the rest of the people who were in the School of Journalism. After a few moments of meeting, we discovered that we were both going into the same major and minor, that we lived in the same dorm building, had the same two chapters left for the last day of sorority recruitment, and we’re both planning on graduating within three years instead of four. Crazy right? We ended up in different sororities and did not have each other’s contact information. However, after classes had begun, we met again outside the lecture hall of our upper-level marketing class. We were two of a small amount of freshmen in that class and were still getting the hang of college. We both did not understand how to find our assigned seats and recognized each other from recruitment. We found comfort in our shared confusion and ended up exchanging contact information and meeting up after class. After class, we found out we shared another class that semester and a friendship was born. We then got very close over the following seven months.

Fast forward a little bit, the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 and we were separated before the end of our freshman year. Emma went back to Wisconsin and Madeleine went to Overland Park, KS. We did not get to see each other again until July. With so much uncertainty and a traumatic event within her family, Emma decided to not return to Lawrence for sophomore year and take her classes fully online from home. This was a devastating blow for our friendship, but it was best for her and we still kept in touch. When our junior year rolled around, it was finally time for Emma to return to campus. We had signed a lease together for an apartment, which we were so excited about. On move in day, it had been over a year since the last time we saw each other and over 16 months since Emma had been in Lawrence.

The two of us are only taking three years to graduate from KU, so this is our last year of school. Emma started a receptionist job at a local hair salon because she will be attending cosmetology school after graduation. Madeleine did not have a job at the time but was considering going back to her serving job at a local brewery in Lawrence. Both of us were wanting to make money and both of us are very self-driven and don’t like the idea of working for other people. We had seen the trend of forever friendship bracelets before, but they were not very accessible. It was Emma’s idea to make them more accessible for people like us: college students. She brought the idea of starting our own small business making forever bracelets to Madeleine, who was honestly kind of skeptical at first. Emma truly believed that we had the capability of making it work and being successful with it. She made a significant initial investment and started a trial and error period of learning how to make the bracelets. Madeleine eventually decided to go all-in as well and so it began.

We brainstormed names for the company first. After a lot of thinking, we ultimately decided on CoCo Linked for the underlying meaning of ‘connect together’. Co- short for connect and Co- the prefix meaning together or with. After that was decided, we went straight to creating an Instagram account and added ‘linked’ to the name for username purposes. We decided on a color scheme and aesthetic. We found a jewelry wholesaler and purchased some sample material. The Instagram gained early interest and we started to get a lot of positive feedback and excitement towards our plans for bringing forever bracelets to Lawrence. CoCo Linked officially launched on October 21, 2021 with a pop-up event at a local event space called Vibe Lawrence on Massachusetts Street; which was almost exactly one month after the initial idea was born.

Since our launch, we shifted focus to doing events with sororities at KU as a sisterhood bonding experience. As a current and a former sorority member, we know the value of friendships within a sorority and found success in sharing our business with this demographic. To explain a little bit about these events, each sorority will have a unique chain style to their chapter that symbolizes their specific sorority and will only be available to those members. Women sign up and we go to their chapter house to link the members while they get to bond over the experience.

Since we are still students, our plans for up until Winter Break include two more sorority sisterhood events, a philanthropic pop-up event with our Panhellenic Association, and two more pop-up events at Vibe Lawrence. We also have big plans for expanding to other campuses and sharing this business with even more sorority members and local consumers.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
As any small business owner has probably experienced, working out all of the kinks to start the business in the first place has been very difficult. We are full-time college students working really hard to graduate a full year early which has been a big challenge. This process has not been without its stress. Emma ran a sole-proprietor business over this previous summer in her home town so she had a small amount of background information on the legalities and financial aspects of starting this, but other than that we had a major learning curve. We have experienced a lot of trial and error and learning from those things. We are finally in a place that we feel confident in, but the road leading here was daunting.

We are working hard to overcome outside doubt. Both of us are only 20 years old, but we have a lot of big ideas and goals. People seem to not think we will be able to accomplish all of the ideas we have, yet we have not let that get to us.

It seems that people are still confused as to what it is that we are doing. This trend is still fairly new and consumers often do not understand the process or the point. We have done a lot of marketing and explaining of our business/service.

We have a high standard for the quality of the product that we sell. We wanted our product to be accessible to young people, but still good quality. Since we buy the chain material from a 3rd party wholesaler, we did a lot of testing to see which styles we thought met our standards. We use 14kt filled gold and stainless steel material that ensures to not rust or tarnish and will last.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about CoCo Linked?
CoCo Linked is a permanent jewelry service that hosts pop-up and sorority sisterhood events. For sorority events, our work begins with communicating with sorority leaders and planning events for their chapter. Planning entails members filling out an interest form to give us an idea of how many members would like to participate. We then schedule the event based on the number of people interested and calculate the amount of hours it would take to link everyone. We can typically link 20 people per hour. Members get linked with the chain that represents their chapter and also have the option to add on additional bracelets from our signature selection. Madeleine typically sizes the bracelets to the customers liking and adds a jump ring to form the bracelet. Customers then move to Emma, who uses a micro pulse arc welding machine to weld the jump ring, therefore making the bracelet “permanent”. Emma then checks out anyone that may have added another bracelet and they are all set. For pop-up events, the service is the same but with a higher frequency of checking out. We have been working with another local business for mutual benefit while we host our events in their space. Majority of what we do is planning the events and once they arrive, it is typically smooth sailing.

What does success mean to you?
We define success by the amount of positive feedback that we receive and how others perceive us. By that, I mean most people do not think we are 20 years old and full-time college students. In reality, we are exactly like them. We are overwhelmed by the amount of people who congratulate us on our ideas and success, they admire our work ethic and willingness to pursue our goals. We have put a lot of effort into this idea and it took off a lot more vigorously than we had expected which makes us very excited for the future and what is in store for our small business. Our success will be determined by the large amounts of people who cherish their forever bracelets and wear them just as proudly as we do.

Pricing:

• Stainless Steel options: $30-32 (plus sales tax)
• 14kt Filled Gold options: $34-38 (plus sales tax)

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cocolinked/?hl=en

Image Credits
Madeleine Nicklaus and Emma Sullivan