Ali Kaminetsky came up with the idea for her business, Modern Picnic, only a couple weeks after graduating from Lehigh University in 2016. Modern Picnic sells lunch boxes that are not only features practical features such as insulated interiors, but also is fashionable.

Ali says the idea for a fashionable high quality lunch box line came after moving to New York City and starting a job in retail. She realized that bringing her lunch to work every day was faster, cheaper, and healthier than buying food every day. Yet, only a week after being in her new job she saw a gap in the lunch box market. As a business professionals, she didn’t have a good option as to what to pack her lunch in. Carrying a plastic bags was not professional for the work setting and most lunch boxes on the market were designed with child-like patterns to appeal to children taking lunches to school. Ali realized that professional adults could use a high-quality, practical lunch box that was still sleek and stylish.

She chose to leave her traditional job behind after a few months in order to ensure that her new business would be a success. Her business, Modern Picnic, has grown exponentially and proved to be very successful. Since the start of the business Ali has expanded the business model by incorporating a goal of sustainability. Each of the products is made with sustainability in mind and every product that features leather material is vegan. Ali clearly shows her entrepreneurial skills by her identification of the problem and taking a risk to pursue solving it. She took an existing product that had not been redesigned for a long time (the lunch box) and put her own twist on it in order to penetrate an existing market (the working professional).