The former Toppers Pizza location is now home to a student-run business: Snag, a delivery service using red and white bags. Indiana University business students Evan Abraham and Zachary Thompson launched Snag, at 212 S. Indiana Ave., earlier this month. The goal, they said, is to provide a quick delivery service for convenience store items in 15 minutes or less.
“Snag is about quick delivery,” Thompson said. “It's something that we're striving to meet every single day because that's how we run our brand.”
Snag was originally founded in 2021 by former University of California, Santa Barbara students Mason Cohen and Jacob Duijser and has now grown to over 10 campuses across the country.
The company hopes to open over 50 locations this fall, including the newly launched one at IU.
Thompson previously visited the Texas Christian University campus and used the Snag delivery service often. Thompson and Abraham later decided that it was needed at IU due to long wait times from other services.
The two students signed a lease for the building previously inhabited by Toppers, and began the cleaning and building process mid-August. In a Reel posted to the Snag IU account, the building was completely empty at the time, and everything in the warehouse including the shelves and freezer had to be arranged.
“It was a long process, but it was fun learning how to run and operate a store, and build it from the ground up,” Thompson said.
Still full-time students at IU, Abraham and Thompson had to figure out how to balance schoolwork, a social life and being full-time managers of the store.
“At some point when you’re juggling three things, something has to give,” Thompson said. “You have to be able to assess the situation and see where your priorities lie.”
Before they launched Snag at IU, the two visited Snag headquarters in Austin, Texas, to get an idea of store operations and how to be a manager of a store.
Since launching, Thompson said the store has seen hundreds of orders and an overall positive reaction from the Bloomington community.
“We’re putting up numbers we didn’t expect to put up,” Abraham said. “You’re driving down the street, people are yelling ‘Snag!’ left and right.”
The majority of Snag’s marketing is done through its Instagram account, which the founders said they wanted to be “Barstool-esque.” Abraham said his goal is to create fun and engaging content through social media.
However, the founders want to keep their content mostly separate from the actual Snag business by drawing attention to the brand through relatable videos.
“From there, we hope that we can bring in new customers and connect us to a base we hadn’t already connected with before,” Abraham said.
For help with their promotion, Bloomington content creator Adrian “Zuke” Zucula has featured in Snag’s content. Zucula commonly wears vibrant T-shirts, roller blades and a marching band hat in videos.
As of Monday, Zucula has appeared in three of Snag’s posts reaching over 100,000 views, including delivering the first Snag order at IU.
“The Snag people are very energetic and enthusiastic people,” Zucala said. "They’re very dedicated to their mission of providing convenience store goods quickly. I believe in doing things over the top and that's what helps promote businesses like Snag and get them off to a great start.”
Snag’s Instagram account has reached over half a million views and garnered over 2,000 followers.
With the business continuing to grow its daily orders, Abraham and Thompson said they want to continue giving the best customer service they can and stick as true as possible to their model.
“We just hit the 100 orders in a day milestone, so we just want to keep moving forward from there,” Thompson said. “We love IU and we hope IU loves us.”
