Scholarship Honors Late Maryland Smith Student

Tom Savransky, a finance student and College Park Scholar who co-founded a virtual fitting company that would improve the experience of shopping online, is being remembered with a memorial scholarship.

Savransky died last month after sustaining injuries during a car accident. He was 23.

Colleagues and peers considered Savransky a software innovator with an entrepreneurial spirit.

While attending Maryland Smith, Savransky co-founded Enly, a company that developed virtual fit assistants to help shoppers identify accurate sizing before ordering clothes online. In 2019, he and co-founder Jonathan Schneider secured a spot in the inaugural cohort of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship’s Terp Startup Fellows, as well as $20,000 in seed funding.

The pair aimed to simplify the e-commerce shopping experience and create a more sustainable retail system by helping brands reduce their number of returns. Their passion for improving the virtual sizing space helped the company obtain the technology sponsor role for hiTechModa, a New York Fashion Week show, for its September 2019 and February 2020 shows.

In memory of Savransky, show organizers created the Savransky STEM Scholarship to honor innovative individuals and companies around the world who are using technology to help usher the fashion industry into the future.

“Tom had the entrepreneurial spirit that we love to see in our student entrepreneurs, and he will be terribly missed. The loss of Tom’s potential is heartbreaking,” said Holly DeArmond, MBA ’11, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, in a statement on behalf of the Dingman Center.

In the statement, Schneider spoke about Savransky’s drive and relentless dedication to perfecting his craft.

“Tom’s spirit was one of an entrepreneur who was willing to do anything to make his business work. In his words, he was willing to sacrifice it all: health, friends, family, simple pleasures,” said Schneider. “In many ways, Tom embodied the story of the true entrepreneur, one who undergoes extreme sacrifice with little recognition. The mortal, real, industrious entrepreneur, rather than the glorified fantasy of the entrepreneur.”

Claudia Donnelly, assistant director of the College Park Scholars’ Business, Society and the Economy (BSE) program, described in a social media post the magnitude of Savransky’s loss and how deeply he will be missed by his friends and loved ones.

“He was a shining star and an ever-inspiring young entrepreneur since the moment he arrived on campus. He earned his Scholars Citation in 2018. I remember a young freshman who asked if he could ‘put his Scholars program on hold’ for the spring semester because he wanted to spend the time alone in a cabin and devote himself to reading the great books – Thoreau, Emerson, Paine and others. He changed his mind and we all benefited from having him with us. He always searched for more and it is heartbreaking that we will not have Thomas's enthusiasm for life and future innovative accomplishments to celebrate.”