Health-care experiences lead Haskayne alum down entrepreneurship path

Hospital beds, IV fluids and surgeries are all things recent Haskayne School of Business alum Chloe Potter knows too well. 

Born with osteomyelitis, a serious bone infection, Potter had been in and out of the hospital since her childhood. In 2017, she was admitted to the hospital again after contracting a strange virus that never got an official diagnosis. Her illness left her unable to walk for several months. 

“It's hard to have to go into the hospital and to get a treatment that makes you feel awful, and to know you need it to just keep surviving, to keep living,” says Potter, BComm’24.

Potter has always been passionate about health care. In 2020, with the help of her Haskayne studies, Cole’s Shirt was developed, a company that provides accessible hospital wear to cancer patients and those with autoimmune conditions going through long-term treatments. Some patients require a port, a plastic disc used to feed medication directly into a large vein or to withdraw blood, placed around the chest area underneath the skin to avoid getting their arm veins poked repeatedly. Cole’s Shirt is a company determined to make the experience far more comfortable.

“Kids are unable to wear clothes while they go through treatments because they can't access the port, so I decided to create a port-accessible shirt for kids,” Potter says.

It was during her time in the hospital where she met her biggest inspiration and the eventual namesake of her company.

“I met a little boy named Cole who was going through cancer treatment, and it was through talking to him that I was inspired to create the shirt,” says Potter. 

As a Haskayne student, Potter wanted to explore her vision of improving the health-care system. “I ended up doing a self-directed study focusing on how to use design thinking to improve the … system,” she says.

Potter chose a career path involving both business and health care. 

“Since I was 14, I wanted to be doctor,” she says. “So, I went into business with this idea that I was going to combine business and health care to help create a better system.”

Entrepreneurial and innovation courses like ENTI 317 helped Potter and her team at the time bring Cole’s Shirt to life. From there, entrepreneurship case competitions, such as being part of Haskayne’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s RBC Fast Pitch Competition in 2022 and the Inter-Collegiate Business Competition, gave her invaluable insight into the world of business.

“We ended up winning the RBC Fast Pitch, which was an amazing milestone,” Potter says. “It provided me with a lot of support — financially, emotionally and physically — and people to bounce ideas off of. Doing case competitions was one of the highlights of my time at Haskayne.”

Aside from her courses, Potter credits a lot of the lessons she’s learned in business to her professors. Currently, she’s working as a research assistant for Haskayne professors Dr. Jo-Louise Huq, BPE’94, PhD; Houston Peschl, BA’98, MBA’10; and Rosalynn Peschl, BComm’10. 

“They push me out of my comfort zone in the best type of ways,” says Potter. “I’ve grown so much as a person working with them.”

As an alum, with plans to get into medical school and become a doctor, Potter’s goal with Cole’s Shirt is to provide kids in the hospital something she wishes she had when she was younger.

“I would love to also, at some point, work in health-care management and look at how we can make systems more efficient in health care, make them more patient-centred,” she says.

Potter has been having discussions with the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation to come up with ways to improve the admission process for patients and implement volunteer programs. 

“I've moved more into providing shirts to hospitals, looking at sitting on advisory committees for the hospital, which has been awesome,” Potter says.

While Cole’s Shirt operates on a donation basis, Potter sees entrepreneurial thinking as a tool not only for business growth, but also for creating meaningful solutions in non-profit and health-care spaces — demonstrating that innovation can drive impact in any context.

“It was always about helping sick kids; it wasn't about a profit,” she says. 

“If I can help one kid be more comfortable, that's amazing on its own.”