About
Built for hallways.
Made for students.
School pride doesn't have to look like a clipart pep rally. We started Locker Loot because the merch students actually want is the merch they make themselves — and there was no way to put it where they live: the locker, the lunch line, the hallway.
Score the drop. That's the whole pitch.
Mission
Pay students for their work.
Students design. The school votes. The machine dispenses the winners. Designers earn royalties. Schools earn 30%. Nobody runs an order form, carries inventory, or runs a fundraiser. Everyone else gets out of the way.
Founder
Who's behind it.
Horace Gipson
Founder & Visionary
35+ years of school-system integration
Horace Gipson is a seasoned executive and entrepreneur with over three decades of experience navigating the complexities of the K-12 institutional market. His career is marked by a rare ability to scale operations while maintaining deep, trust-based relationships with educational leaders.
Unmatched market access
Relationships, not contacts.
Throughout his tenure as a Regional Manager and business owner, Horace has cultivated a vast network of Superintendents, Purchasing Directors, and Activity Directors. These are not just contacts, but active professional relationships ready to be leveraged. Upon launch, Locker Loot will utilize "Intent to Commit" agreements, securing high-profile pilot locations on Day 1 through Horace's existing administrative pipeline.
Proven growth & scaling
Numbers, not projections.
- 1,000%+ Revenue transformation: orchestrated a 1,000%+ revenue increase in the Bay Area, scaling a territory from $360k to over $4M.
- 400+ Operational expansion: built the Sacramento and Los Angeles branches from the ground up, now serving over 400 collective accounts.
- 35yr Logistics mastery: decades of experience managing the high-precision logistics of the school portrait industry — where complex scheduling and physical delivery are paramount — ensures Locker Loot's restocking and supply chain cycles will be handled with professional rigor.
Technical readiness
Already in active development.
Unlike many early-stage concepts, Locker Loot is already in active development. Horace is currently leading a dedicated technical team building the app and backend infrastructure to ensure a seamless "Plug and Play" experience for schools. His current leadership role provides the unique stability and bandwidth required to transition into this venture without losing momentum or operational focus.
Mission-driven
$300,000+ in scholarships, before this.
Driven by years of observing schools struggle with budget gaps and the lack of turnkey fundraising solutions, Horace designed Locker Loot to be the answer. His commitment is evidenced by his philanthropic record, having led a non-profit that has awarded over $300,000 in scholarships to Bay Area students.
The Locker Loot advantage
With the hustle of a proven salesperson, the vision of a successful founder, and the infrastructure of an expert logistics manager, Horace Gipson is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between student creativity and sustainable school funding.
Co-founder & CTO
The technology, end to end.
Andre Darby leads engineering at Locker Loot — the app students live in, the dashboard admins trust, and the hardware-to-cloud pipeline that makes a drop actually land in the hallway.
Where Horace's expertise opens the doors, Andre's engineering keeps the platform running once they do. He architects the system that turns student submissions into voted-on, moderated, manufactured, vended product — and reports it back to schools in real time.
What he owns
- Student app (iOS, Android, web)
- Admin dashboard + reporting
- Vending hardware integration
- Voting infrastructure + integrity
- Payment + revenue split engine
- Content moderation pipeline
The story
Why we built this.
School spirit gear, for most schools, is a stack of identical T-shirts ordered from a catalog. Students don't wear it. It sits in the office. The school orders less next year. Repeat until the budget for it disappears.
Meanwhile every student in the building is sketching, posting, designing — making things they actually want to wear. None of it gets paid for. None of it gets made. None of it ends up in the hallway.
Locker Loot fixes the asymmetry. Students design. The school votes. A machine in the hallway dispenses the winners. The kids who made it earn a cut. The school earns a cut. Nobody runs an order form or carries inventory.
That's the whole thing. We build the hardware, the app, and the fulfillment so any school can run it without lifting a finger. School pride becomes something students wear because they made it — not because someone made them buy it.
