10 Campus Installations in 31 Days
August is the month campuses come to life. Move-in crews, orientation groups, first-week floor events, and about nine thousand questions for every student affairs professional.
It is also the month our install team was BUSY!
We opened 16 new RecRe boxes across 10 campuses in August. Some are classic recreation setups. A few are doing things RecRe has never done before. All of them mean more students with free access to gear they used to have to buy or go without.
Here is the whole run, campus by campus.
Franklin College
Franklin, Indiana. Student Center, first floor.
This one is RecRe at its most classic, and we mean that as a compliment.
The box sits on the first floor of the Student Center near the Follett store, an area that gets a lot of foot traffic and could use a lot more reason to stop. It is stocked with spikeball, hammocks, cornhole, and the rest of the outdoor gear that turns a nice afternoon into an actual plan.
A student walks past on the way to class, grabs a set of cornhole boards, and suddenly the lawn outside has eight people on it. That is the entire idea.
Northwestern University
Evanston, Illinois. Norris University Center and two pickup locations.
Three purple RecRe locations at Northwestern.
The Norris University Center got a traditional rental setup, the kind our campuses know well. The other two are pickup boxes, built for items that need to be scheduled and collected rather than borrowed and returned.
That opens up a lot. Basic needs items. Pantry orders. Anything a student should be able to pick up on their own time, without an office hour and without a conversation they might not want to have.
If your campus runs a pantry or a basic needs program and you have been trying to figure out after-hours access, this is worth twenty minutes of your time. Book time with us and we will walk you through how the pickup setup works.
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, Virginia. Student Union.
Virginia installs hit different for us. Our headquarters is here, so every box that goes up in the Commonwealth feels like a hometown game.
ODU put theirs in the Student Union, and it is already busy. Students are using the space at hours when the building used to be a hallway with furniture in it. Late night, early morning, the gaps between classes. The box does not keep office hours, so neither does the space around it.
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, Virginia. Breakzone, Student Union.
Two Virginia launches in one paragraph of this blog. We are thrilled about it.
The Breakzone box is stocked with Legos, board games, and the kind of gear that keeps a lounge alive on a Tuesday night. Nobody plans to spend two hours building something with three people they just met. It happens because the pieces were right there.
Rollins College
Winter Park, Florida. Outdoor sports courts.
This is the one our install team wants on a poster.
Rollins wanted a box that works outdoors, right next to the sports courts, with no compromise on what it can do. So we worked with their team on a purpose-built concrete slab with power and data run to it.
The result is a fully outdoor RecRe box that activates the courts directly. A student shows up with a friend and no ball, and that is no longer a problem. Big credit to the Rollins team for planning this one out with us from the ground up.
Penn State Abington
Abington, Pennsylvania.
Mid-month we opened two Penn State campuses in the same stretch, starting with Abington.
Penn State Brandywine
Media, Pennsylvania. Three boxes, all supporting game spaces.
And then Brandywine, with three boxes going in at once.
All three support game spaces on campus, which means the gear is sitting right where students already gather instead of behind a checkout desk somewhere else in the building.
These are also some of the best looking boxes we shipped all month. Brandywine went with a custom wrap, and it makes the boxes feel like they belong to the campus rather than like equipment that got dropped off. Any partner can do this. If you want your colors, your logo, or your mascot on the box, we will build it.
Penn State now has RecRe boxes running across four campuses in the system, which is a big deal for us. We are working with student unions, campus rec, and housing teams across Penn State, and we plan to keep expanding what we offer them.
To the Penn State partners who bet on this platform early, thank you!
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, Virginia. Barnes & Noble at VCU Bookstore.
VCU is now at nine boxes across the university.
Student union. Dining. Residence life. And as of August, the bookstore.
We partnered with Barnes & Noble and the VCU Bookstore on a try before you buy box that lets students borrow the gear they are thinking about buying. It drives foot traffic into the store and gives students real time with the product before they spend money on it.
This one deserves its own read. Here is the full story on what a lending box does for a campus store.
Nine boxes across four departments at one university is the model we get most excited about. One platform, one dashboard, a lot of different problems getting solved.
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia. Recreation center and two residence halls.
Another Virginia campus, and another three-box install.
One box went into the rec center and two went into residence halls. The res hall boxes are built around accessibility, putting gear right where students already live instead of asking them to walk across campus for it.
The rec center box starts indoors and will eventually move outdoors. Mason has real plans for this platform, and we are glad to be building it out with them.
Lafayette College
Easton, Pennsylvania. Next to the new walk-in, walk-out dining concept.
Our last August launch creates an automation destination.
The box sits next to Lafayette’s new automated retail shop, the kind you walk into, grab what you want, and walk out. Students get free access to rental gear from the RecRe box, then walk a few feet into the shop and buy a drink or a snack.
Two kinds of automated technology, one location, no “check out” staff required for either. Self-service rentals and self-service retail turn out to be very good neighbors.
Where that leaves us
RecRe now serves nearly 2 million students across almost 100 campuses in the United States. Every one of those boxes is a place where a student can get free access to what they need, without asking anyone, at whatever hour they happen to need it.
Thank you to every campus team that spent part of their August pointing our install crew toward a loading dock. September is already booked with more.
