Meet Maria Penn, a young entrepreneur with a passion for nature and a love of art. Maya’s business began when she found a vibrant piece of fabric lying around in her house. After a flash of inspiration and some creativity, she converted the scrap of fabric into a zebra print headband adorned with a butterfly. After this, more projects followed, ending up with people stopping her on the street and asking her where she bought them. At the age of eight, she decided to start her own fashion line featuring her creative accessories. Now, thirteen years later, Maya’s fashion designs are bought from all over the world.

From the beginning, she resolved to create an environmentally friendly business, and she hasn’t changed her mind once, even after all these years. She combined her passion for the environment with her love of art and fashion, and her love of the natural world led her to want to preserve it in any way she could. Many dyes used in the fashion industry are harmful to the environment. These dyes are used in what is called “fast fashion,” when companies use cheap but harmful products on their clothes. Maya uses alternative techniques to dye her products, such as fruit and vegetable dyes and even herbal teas. After her business had grown, she reshaped it into a nonprofit organization called Maya’s Ideas 4 the Planet with the objective of spreading awareness about environmental issues and encouraging local action. “I had a lot of causes that I wanted to spread the word about, and I thought the best way to do that was a nonprofit.”

Maya is very passionate about art and nature, and in addition to being an entrepreneur, she is also an animator, artist, and filmmaker. By the age of sixteen, she had released two animated series and published a book. Now, she is working on a project with her non-profit organization about creating eco-friendly and reusable sanitary pads for girls in third-world countries. “Earlier last year, I learned about how girls in Nepal and Uganda can’t go to school on their cycle because they don’t have any sanitary pads. When I learned about that, it was a big concern for me. There are other projects like this, other companies that are donating pads to these girls, but the only problem is they’re not sustainable or reusable. For example, they may receive a pack of pads that are all disposable. So once they use it, then what? They don’t have any more and the problem starts all over again. When my nonprofit’s sanitary napkins are finally worn down and thrown away, they’re biodegradable and sustainable and won’t hurt the environment.”

What I find most inspiring about Maya’s story is that she found a problem that didn’t seem to be easily solved and still tried her best to combat it, no matter how small the results seemed. I believe we can all be inspired by her efforts to improve the lives of people and the condition of the planet through her many enterprises.

You can visit her website here.

Jenna Meek and Jess Hunt are two young entrepreneurs who founded REFY, a beauty brand on a mission to redefine beauty. Their business idea began when Jenna met beauty influencer Jess Hunt on a photoshoot and noticed Jess’ exhaustive brow routine. “It was something ridiculous, like five different eyebrow gels, multiple brushes, and then a pomade and a pencil to do her brows every single day,” said Jenna. “her Instagram followers constantly asked what products she used on her brows to create her signature brushed-up look, so creating a streamlined brow collection made sense.” The two recognized the gap in the market for easy, uncomplicated brow care and created a brow sculpting product near the end of 2018.

Jess used her Instagram following of 1.3 million and her clever marketing skills to promote their idea, while Jenna, already the founder of Shrine, a viral color cosmetics and hair brand, planned and managed REFY using her business experience. After developing their product for two years, they released it in November 2020 to instant success, with their brow care product completely selling out after only six weeks. When they restocked the next January, they had over 10,000 pre-orders already and sold a total of 15,000 orders in the first four hours.

Their business has since grown to include various skincare products such as bronzers, highlighters, blush shades, and of course, brow products with a focus on enhancing and embracing natural beauty, and have been positively reviewed in Sheerluxe, Glamour, and Vogue. Soon after their resounding success, Sephora approached Jess and Jenna with an offer to stock REFY. “Sephora is the biggest beauty destination in the world for premium cosmetics and was the number one retailer I wanted to partner with when I had the initial idea for the three-stage brow collection. I could only have dreamt that we’d complete that goal within 6 months when we first launched the business.” Jenna said. “It’s an incredibly exciting time for the business to see what we can achieve next – we have big plans for the next six months!”

Meet Laureen Asseo, a young entrepreneur who founded her business Fresh N’ Lean from her own kitchen. Her business started when she decided to help her father, a French immigrant who had been facing serious health problems after years of overindulging in processed American foods, change his diet to include organic and healthy foods. She began making dishes for him with natural, whole-food ingredients, and when her friends noticed her father’s improvement, they asked her if she would consider making healthy meals for them also.

She saw the need many people had for healthy, fast meals and in 2010, she launched Fresh N’ Lean. Starting up a food business that depended on mass production is hard when you don’t have money, but with calculations and determination, Laureen made her business what it is today. Fresh N’ Lean is a meal production business that offers over 110 food choices, including gluten-free, vegan, keto, and paleo meals, as well as providing the flexibility of including or excluding ingredients according to taste. The business has grown to making over $100 million annually and since the business inception, it has grown 100% year over year in sales. Laureen is an incredible example of recognizing a prevalent issue, figuring out how to fix it, and tackling it efficiently.

William Zhou is the Co-founder & CEO of Chalk.com, which is an education software for K-12 teachers. Much like Microsoft Office, Chalk.com is a group of productivity apps that help with lesson planning, assessment, and collaboration which help by providing a personalized education for students.

Zhao was born in Beijing, China, and immigrated to Canada, where he enrolled in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. While at Waterloo, he co-founded Chalk.com after he noticed how overwhelmed his teachers were. He explains,

“I had always thought that teaching is an easy job. I thought teachers taught from a textbook and got 3 months off in a year. It wasn’t until I visited my own high school teachers that I realized it’s not the case. They were struggling with an overwhelming amount of work—dealing with lesson planning, assessment, and attendance, in addition to fending off angry parents and bureaucratic administration. I told them I couldn’t help them with the latter two but I could help ease their daily tasks. That’s when I started Chalk.com.” Zhao created Planboard, an offspring of Chalk, which received $25,000 from the University of Waterloo in 2012. In 2013, Planboard placed second in the Singapore Management University global

business plan competition and also partnered with the Ontario Teachers’ Federation to provide ready-made lesson plan resources.

When they first started up, less than 100 teachers paid for it in the first year. Seeing this, they decided to pivot and change their business model by making the services free but charging schools and districts for special aspects. The plan worked, and today, Chalk.com is used in over 20,000 schools and is used by over 200,000 teachers. It is empowering teachers to focus on their students, not their many distractions. Recently, the website has used the effect of the COVID-19 virus and the sudden switch to online schooling to expand its network. By using Chalk.com to help with learning during the lockdown and give helpful tips to teachers, he turned this problem into an opportunity and showed the helpfulness of his website.