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By: Donnamy Steele

Andalusia natives Colin Marcum and Darious Davis teamed up to provide custom masks for local high school students and teachers.

Marcum explained the process of opening Live Well Mask Co as well as his goals for the business.

Live Well Mask Co launched at 10 a.m., July 9, and has five local schools on the website.

“So currently we have Opp, Andalusia, Straughn, Red Level and Pleasant Home,” Marcum said. “We have five schools dropping tonight, but we’re not sure which five we are dropping yet.”

Marcum plans to expand the selections over the next few weeks.

“We are planning on adding around 30 high schools in the state, and then we want to move on to sororities and fraternities at the University of Alabama,” Marcum said. “So, we’ll have masks that they can buy with their sorority or fraternity letters on them. The launch has been good so far. Our main goal with the launch is we didn’t release a lot of schools because we wanted to get a grasp of who was really interested. So we’ve gotten about 15 different requests for new schools so we’ll be adding more schools throughout the week and over the next few weeks.”

Several other municipalities have gained interest in Live Well Mask Co., as well.

“We’ve had Realtown, Georgiana, Tuscaloosa and 15 schools in different counties that have reached out that are interested,” Marcum said. “Andalusia Health is definitely interested, so we’ll have local businesses through Andalusia that are ordering as well.”

Marcum was inspired to start the business by a friend’s recent success.

“I have a friend named CJ Pierson that is a republican activist that started a similar project doing Donald Trump masks. He has made about $32,000 in the past week off of his masks,” Marcum said. “We pretty much used his exact same format for making the website and staging it. It was really inspired by that and it was an open market really since nobody has done it yet, so we figured since many schools are being required to use masks we figured people would jump on this and might want custom masks, but that was really the root of it with CJ starting up his store. It’s pretty much the same thing, but we switched it around and did high schools instead. We found something that was a really untouched market and we felt that Covington County would want custom masks. It was really nothing more than finding an untapped market and accessing that.”

Marcum said he faced a learning curve when building the website and planning the launch.

“There was definitely a learning curve. Everything is through Shopify which is an online website builder, but they also provide you with the resources to find companies that do distribute different products so we had to find distributors who manufactured these masks and could do so sustainably resourced through recycled goods and stuff like that. It was definitely a learning curve. Making a website is a lot harder than it looks and it was really interesting to dive into this design field.”

The masks ship from out of state according to Marcum.

“We ship through on-demand distributors, so as soon as someone orders a product it is processed, manufactured and shipped straight to them so it’s immediate and there isn’t any waiting for a certain quota to be met.”

Marcum encourages people to participate in a survey if they are interested in seeing their school or business represented on the website.

“On the website, people can go in and there is a survey at the bottom of the website that they can register schools or organizations, which is a big thing because we want to add more schools and organizations to the website.”

Live Well Mask Co offers a growing variety of products also branded with local high school logos. “We have more collections, or schools, to come. We offer gaiters, masks, phone cases, stickers, and laptop sleeves. We’ll probably add more to the product line for each school as we get farther down the road,” Marcum said.

Marcum said Live Well Mask Co has had a good start since its launch and they look forward to the future of the business.

To shop at Live Well Mask Co, visit their website at www.livewellmaskco.com or Facebook page, Live Well Mask Co.