Love Your Melon plans to mobilize its mission of making a difference for cancer patients when its founders embark on a nationwide mobile head-shaving campaign in January.

The month-long tour will take juniors Zachary Quinn and Brian Keller to universities in 13 states across the country from Wisconsin to Massachusetts to Louisiana.

Love Your Melon celebrated its first anniversary Oct. 22 with a head-shaving campaign at St. Thomas and throughout the Twin Cities—the event that sparked the idea for a national tour.

“We had so much success with that, that we wanted to share that experience with other people around the country,” Quinn said.

Keller said he hopes the tour will bring joy to children and their families and raise awareness about the nonprofit.

“It will really be able to benefit Love your Melon because we’ll be able to spread our mission much faster and be able to connect with all different communities, not just the Twin Cities area,” Keller said.

Senior Lesle Marshall-Mahlik said she thinks the tour will help Love Your Melon grow.

“I think it’s a great way to not only market and promote their organization, but to maximize the number of hats they can sell and kids they can help,” Marshall-Mahlik said.

Quinn said he and Keller plan to sell and give 5,000 hats in total, helping the company reach its goal of gifting 10,000 hats.

“With the 10,000 hours rule—which is that if you’re going to be a professional, you have to put in 10,000 hours of practice—we figured that we got to do 10,000 products,” Quinn said. “That’s not for sales in products, that’s 10,000 products in people’s hands around the country.”

Marketing professor David Brennan said Love Your Melon is practicing what’s called a market development strategy.

“If you deal with only your local markets, you limit yourself,” Brennan said. “If you can increase the awareness of your product and its efficacy, you should be able to do a lot better.”

Keller said he feels people have grown accustomed to hearing about cancer, which he thinks has contributed to a lack of support for cancer patients.

“It’s become something that everybody is used to and that nobody is really doing much about,” Keller said. “They’re trying to find cures, and they’re working toward that, but there needs to be something that can impact these children and what they’re going through now, and so that’s really what we’re setting out to do.”

Kayla Bengtson can be reached at Beng2004@stthomas.edu.