;From Classroom to Can: The Story Behind Sweet Carolina Water
Most water brands start with an investor deck. Ours started in a club meeting room on the Appalachian State campus, with a group of students who had never run a company before.
That's the part of Sweet Carolina Water's story we're most proud of — and it's worth telling properly.
The idea that started it all
The spark came from outside the classroom. Bob Wulf and App State alum Ed Seckinger — co-founders of Rare Stash Bourbon — brought an idea to Erich Schlenker, managing director of App State's Transportation Insight Center for Entrepreneurship: what if students built a real, sellable canned water company from scratch?
Schlenker took the idea to the Association of Student Entrepreneurs (ASE), a student-led nonprofit that had already proven the model worked with Beans2Brew, a campus coffee shop students built and ran themselves. ASE said yes, and Sweet Carolina Water became the club's next experiment in learning by doing.
Twenty students, one product
Building a beverage brand from nothing meant more than picking a label. Roughly twenty students signed on, pulled from majors across campus — finance, marketing, HR, biology, business, economics, and law — and split into teams to handle everything a real startup needs: legal structure, supply chain, branding, sales, and timelines.
It wasn't simple. The team had to think through succession planning from day one, since every student on the project would eventually graduate. Caleb Sizemore, a Graphic Communications Management major, stepped in as lead designer and built the brand identity — the logo, the can design, even a 12-pack case — before graduating in 2025. Sarah Zwaryczuk took on sales as a junior marketing major, Gabriel Baerreis ran operations, and Kiera Murphy managed the production facility. Each of them has talked about the same thing: the gap between planning a business on paper and actually running one.
Built to outlast any one student
Sweet Carolina Water operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which means the money it makes doesn't go to shareholders. It goes back into ASE, funding the next group of students who get to learn entrepreneurship the same way this team did: by actually doing it.
That's also why the project was always designed to survive graduation. New students rotate in to lead marketing, sales, operations, and finance, picking up where the last team left off and adding their own chapter to the brand.
Where things stand now
Sweet Carolina Water is sold in 16-oz cans, distributed locally around Boone and the High Country, with the team working on expanding retail partnerships and adding vending machines and coolers to make the water easier to find. The goal isn't to grow fast — it's to grow the way the rest of the project has: thoughtfully, with students at the center of every decision.
If you want to follow along as the next class of students takes the brand further, the best place to do that is @sweetcarolinawater on Instagram, or pick up a 4-pack and see what college students built from an idea and a borrowed barn.