Every year, The Fashion Show, a student-run organization at Iowa State, sells thousands of tickets to Iowa State students, alumni and community members wanting to attend their show. Although Stephens Auditorium sells tickets online through Ticketmaster, the same incentives for pre-sale customers and high school students as buying at the box office do not apply.

“It’s hard, especially when it is an incentive [for donors],” said Emilee Meyer, senior in apparel, merchandising and design (AMD) and outreach producer. “We can sell tickets through TicketMaster, but there are extra fees on that, and you can’t get the group discount or the student discount.”

Greek organizations recently reached out to The Fashion Show about selling tickets to the show online for high school students, as Greek Visit Day, a day showcasing the greek community to incoming Iowa State students, is the same day as The Fashion Show.  

“If [high school students] want a student discount, they would have to go to the ticket office,” said Alexandra Johnson, senior in AMD and a managerial producer.  “Obviously, that’s really hard for students in high school who live a ways away — they are not going to drive an hour to two hours to go buy a ticket.” 

The Fashion Show also has concerns about selling its apparel online to promote its show to an even bigger audience outside of Iowa State. It is currently only able to sell its merchandise in person through its pop-up shop and at the show.  

“AMD alumni always want to keep updated with The Fashion Show,” Johnson said. “They like the merchandise for those who have been involved. Especially this year with viewing parties, I feel it would increase sales in the merchandise for people who are going to these viewing parties.”

Director of Student Activities George Micalone weighed in on the issue of having an individual website with his expertise in the student organization policies.

“Ultimately, it comes down to domain policy and treasurers office policy, related to credit card authorization for sales,” Micalone said.

For the domain policy, student organizations and departments have to follow the DNS policy, or domain, name system policy, which in short says you have to have your websites on the iastate.edu domain, Micalone said. Because The Fashion Show wants to create its own website, the organization would still have to go through the Iowa State domain.

“When you blend a student organization, class and a department affiliation of the AESHM department [apparel, events and hospitality management department], student organizations as a whole follow the same rules as departments,” Micalone said. 

The problem going through the Iowa State domain is due to policies against third-party payments, such as Paypal and Venmo, which are for the financial safety of Iowa State students.

A solution for web-based credit card payments is TouchNet, a campus e-commerce-based system, in the student organization marketplace to collect registrations, dues and other payments.

“Unfortunately, through [the TouchNet] process, we have learned there is a lot of complexity in selling merchandise online,” Micalone said. “Particularly it relates to fulfillment and delivery of goods. For us, we had intentions on building out a merchandise portion of our marketplace but determined that there is way too many complexities and rules we would not be able to abide by if we set it up that way, so we can’t sell merchandise through our system.”

The one solution to The Fashion Show’s problems would be to work with the AESHM department, if agreed upon, to create an e-commerce page to attempt to sell merchandise.

“With the size and presence of The Fashion Show, I wouldn’t be surprised if [the AESHM department] entertained the conversation, but it would cost them money to develop it and they would have to have someone to manage it, run it, fulfill the orders and properly charge folks,” Micalone said.