Archive for Women Entrepreneurs

Helping Young People Achieve Their Dreams as an Entrepreneur Who Has Achieved Hers

Erin McGoff was in the midst of getting her degree to American University when she started realizing her talent in professional advising. People seemed drawn to her for help with applying to jobs through resumes, interviews, and beyond, and McGoff enjoyed every minute of it.

However, this prospect was left unexamined as she graduated and became an editor and director of films, including award-winning Amazon film “This Little Land of Mines.” McGoff was supported through winning various awards, including AU SoC Woman of the Year Award and the International Reporting Fellowship award from the Pulitzer Center, and has worked with many mainstream companies, including National Geographic and Google.

However, McGoff saw an opportunity in the surge of popularity with TikTok during the pandemic to fill the gap in a lack of career advice being readily available to those who needed it. She started posting tips on navigating the professional world, including a humorous element to appeal to a young target audience she thought might benefit from such advice as her friends did and which she delighted in as a young adult. Her main channel is deemed AdviceWithErin and exists over several channels, boasting 845,000 followers YouTube and 2 million on Instagram.

Scrolling through McGoff’s YouTube account, users are met with videos detailing anything from “How To: Negotiate Your Salary in a Job Offer” to “How to Deal with a Rude Person (in work and life)” to “Cabin Tour: building a TINY HOUSE (325 sqft) | Update #3,” showing a diverse pool of content that appeals to many different demographics within her target audience of those seeking advice in entering the professional world and those just generally interested in her channel. McGoff is an exemplary example of someone who kept a skillset in her back pocket and acted on it from a mindset of openness and passion whenever she saw an opportunity to do so.

Erin Smith- Founder of FacePrint

Erin Smith a nine teen year old girl, thought unlike anyone else. She was watching a video of a guy named Michael Fox, and from that video, Smith had some great ideas, and she couldn’t get those ideas off her mind. Her analysis of it was “Whenever a Parkinson’s patient would laugh or smile, it came off as really emotionally distant.” Smith took this and reached out to clinicians and caregivers to ask about this, and she found out that they have seen similar facial expressions from their patients. This was all before a Parkinson’s diagnosis was made. Smith who is a science enthusiast grew up doing experiments in her own kitchen. She wanted to make a change so people could be diagnosed with a disease, so she got to work and started to build a diagnostic system that was called FacePrint. This is really cool to see, as Smith saw a problem with a laugh or a smile, she knew there was a issue and that she needed to make a change to help these people out. She innovated in a special way to help this generation with a serious problem. Face Print is a selfie stick that captures changes in facial expressions over time to help catch disorders like Parkinson’s.  Smith hopes that FacePrint becomes a tool that diagnoses and monitors the disease. As of now, her creation has an 88 percent accuracy rate and that is nearly 7 percent more than regular tools. Smith has been receiving funds from Michael Fox foundation and pharmaceutical companies. Her technology is going under trial at Standford University. Smith has done some many great things with this product and to sum it up she had said this “I really want to optimize for my personal learning,” and “as well as for the best way I can help shape and build the future of neurological and mental healthcare.” This is so amazing for a teenager to do. The fact that she is saving our generations health is just so awesome. She definitely fills for a girl with a mind like an entrepreneur but not only that, she wants to help everyone, that is so special.

Link to Source: Meet 16 Teen Founders Who Are Building Big Businesses — and Making Big Money | Entrepreneur

Eleven the Entrepreneur

If you’ve watched Stranger Things on Netflix, I bet you’ve heard of the starring actress Millie Bobby Brown. She took the world by storm as Eleven, kickstarting her career as a talented actress. Many people know her, but fewer know her as an entrepreneur. She gained huge amounts of recognition and popularity from her roles in Stranger Things and other shows and movies in her teenage years. This fanbase gave her a platform to launch her own business at only 15. In 2019,  Millie started Florence by Mills, a clean fragrance and cosmetics company. She named her business after her great-grandma, Florence, whose love for life and self-expression inspired her. After sitting in hundreds of makeup chairs for acting roles, Millie discovered her cosmetics preferences and realized that makeup should be about self-love. The vision of her brand is focused on the enhancement of natural beauty and artistic expression. She was adamant about making her products clean with no harsh chemical or toxic ingredients or animal testing. Millie created the Olivia Hope Foundation, a fund inspired by her friend Liv, who battled leukemia. Florence by Mills donates to this fund in support of finding a cure for childhood cancers. In February 2024, Millie expanded her brand by launching Florence by Mills clothing, a sustainable clothing brand with an emphasis on loungewear and activewear designed for comfort and style. This brand dominates a portion of their revenue to Girls Inc., One Tree Planted, and Joey’s Friends as Millie has expressed her passion for charity work for women, the environment, and animals. Millie’s businesses have both flourished because of their quality products and positive impacts. She turned her commercial endeavors into social enterprises that give back to the community. Millie’s positivity, creativity, and empathy are embodied in her brands, and her products are high quality, affordable, and fun to use.

 

Check out her clothing and beauty brand.

Scents, Smells, Soaps, Tricks, Trends & Tips

At the young age of seventeen, Katie Carson started a business. It all started in a soap making class. Katie was inspired by that class to create her own business out of soap. That is where her passion and love for soap began. Obsessed with knew scents, smells, and soaps, Katie dove into her imagination and began to create creative soaps. On her website, Katie states that her mission is to love people through soap art. She demonstrates this through all of her social media platforms by creating content that is engaging and humorous. Katie markets her company mainly through her YouTube channel and Instagram. Her YouTube channel has over nine hundred videos full of content for her customers. She makes videos about tips, tricks, trends, and more. She creates playlists for her videos and has several organized topics. On the YouTube channel, there is a video line where she records herself creating new soaps and shares her knowledge to assist other soap creators. Many of the soaps she creates are inspired from her own imagination, she comes up with new scents on her own. Her brand, Royalty Soaps has partnered with several companies, such as, google, Squarespace, skill share, Tik Tok, Audible, Hello Fresh, Brooklinen, and Rakuten. Royalty soaps is unique because of its owner, Katie Carson and her view on the world of soap making. She sees soap as a way to positively impact others. One quality that has helped Katie Carson to excel in her career is her desire to always be genuine. Throughout her videos she strives to have a consistent positive attitude and takes every opportunity to show her comedic side. Even when she started a family, she continued to run her business. Katie Carson can be an inspiration to all of us because she is doing what she loves and making a positive effect on the community through her love of soap.

Katie Carson - Age, Family, Bio | Famous Birthdays

Pixel To Persona: Safiya Nygaard

Safiya Nygaard is a very successful American Youtuber from Chicago, Illinois. She attended Standford University, studying English and Drama. She quickly noticed her love for production and began working for BuzzFeed in 2015. She started her career at BuzzFeed creating the popular show called Ladylike with a few others. After she left BuzzFeed she was able to put more effort into her own YouTube channel. She has gained over 10 million subscribers since she started posting on her channel in 2017.

Collabs, New Brand, and Other Opportunities:

YouTubers certainly are entrepreneurs but not what some people would think. YouTubers advertise content and as they come into their “voice” that then turns into a brand and this has been successful for many YouTubers including Safiya. Safiya has been able to be a part of many great projects and opportunities. Some of these projects include creating a lipstick collection with popular makeup brand: ColourPop. Aswell as collaborating with fellow YouTuber Cristine Rotenberg AKA Simplynailogical with a limited-edition collection of nail polish from Cristine’s brand Holo Taco. Safiya also owns her own apparel brand called Fiendish Behavior which is a perfect embodiment of who she is. She has added her makeup experiments to her hoodies, t-shirts, stickers, tote bags, blankets, and sweats. Safiya would call her clothing style as “comfortable vampire” which means wearing all black in comfortable styles and textures.

She is known for her series called “Bad Beauty Science” which essentially means mixing large amounts of a single type of products and creating a “Franken” etc (She has mixed almost every type of makeup product together).  This has iterated into many off shoots of channel topics. She loves testing “Weird Fashion” such as Platform Crocs, 9-foot-long jeans and many many more. Recently she has moved into showcasing her cool travel opportunities with her husband also fellow YouTuber Tyler Williams. They have visited an underwater hotel, slept in an Igloo, slept in a Japanese Capsule Hotel, and again many other places. As a fellow viewer and subscriber, I like to say she is an investigative channel of weird things but weird is a good thing because that makes the content very interesting. I found her channel in 2018 so I have been a loyal lover of her content for 7 years and still enjoy every aspect of her videos. One other detail I would like to mention is when she has a video idea she will do whatever it takes to complete it just because she is that interested in the topic. Some of my favorite longer more deep dive type videos include, “I Stayed At Every Hotel On The Vegas Strip”, “I Ate At Every Celebrity Chef’s Restaurant On The Vegas Strip”, and “I Got An 18th Century Makeover” just to name a few. In her 18th Century Makeover video she got the opportunity to live out her childhood dreams and visit Colonial Williamsburg and get to wear 18th century attire and get to participate in activities there. In her earlier videos she would mention how she wanted to go to Colonial Williamsburg and now she finally got to go. It was really cool for me as a fan to see her get to visit a place she always talks about, and I was very invested in videos like these.

Conclusion:

These videos take a lot of time, planning, and funding. I am amazed at the work that is put into these videos from Safiya, Tyler and their team. Both of them are also relatively young being 32 and 33 years old. They all have been working very hard on this channel and brand since they graduated college. As a long story short I really wanted to showcase at least one YouTuber in the blog post agenda and I think it is a very interesting type on Entrepreneur to research.

Here is Safiya’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbAwSkqJ1W_Eg7wr3cp5BUA

(I tried every method but I was unable to add any pictures, her thumbnails are really eye catching)

Wise Pocket – Sofia Overton

Sofia Overton noticed at just 13 years old a common problem: many clothes for children and women lacked pockets. She came up with an idea to solve this problem, socks with built in pockets. With the help and support of her family and friends she turned this idea into a business and started selling them. Deciding to go on shark tank was one of the best choices she ever made. She rigorously prepared and made a massive effort to improve her presentation skills. The Sharks were impressed by her pitch, and they offered her a deal. The deal was $35,000 for 25% equity in wise pocket products. After this win, her company grew through new problems and challenges. The company started to use social media to grab interest in their products and carved out a unique space in the fashion world. The socks come in fun colors and patterns and in many stylish choices.

10 Interesting Facts About Sofi Overton You Do Not Wish to Miss Out

Sofia’s business endeavors serve as a great example to young people today who have a dream of starting a business. Not only did she find a problem with a unique market, but she competed on shark tank and earned a deal. This deal launched her business into a new level of success. While navigating new problems and challenges the business grew into different areas of interest for a unique market.

It’s inspiring to see someone take an idea and run with it. We can learn from Sofia and learn to take risks and grow through great opportunities. Her developing story goes to show that there’s no substitute for following a dream with passion.

Annie Lawless- Suja Juice

Since the 1980s fitness frenzy, so many people have adored fresh pressed juice. Not only is it a wonderful source of nutrients but it’s delicious too! Many may look at this market and see no need for improvement but Annie Lawless did. Annie co-founded Suja juice in 2012 alongside her 2 partners. Suja is a clean organic fresh pressed juice brand you can find in almost any grocery store in a variety of flavors.

Annies’s story begins with her journey of her health, she has celiacs disease which has had to make her very weary of what food she puts in her body. Throughout her journey with food, she has become an expert in knowing what is and is not okay for her body. And in this journey is when she realized she could make a business out of her findings. Suja prides itself by only putting purely organic fruits and vegetables in their juices. As well as using a specific process called high-pressure processing which “captures all the nutrition in (their) organic produce, keeping them shelf-stable, without preservatives.” Suja has also branched out from juices as well. They also sell a variety of cleanses, wellness shots and powdered greens. Suja has grown rapidly over the years with 18 million dollars in profit its first year of business and now has an estimated 300 million dollar net worth.

Annie however is not only the co-founder of Suja but is also the founder of Lawless beauty, a beauty company that guarantees celiac safe makeup to all its customers. Lawless is sold at all Sephora’s and has rapidly grown in popularity since it was created in 2017. Annie has really set the new standard for safety in not only the arena of food but makeup as well. So next time you’re at the store or wanting to try a new brand of makeup, check out Suja juice and Lawless Beauty!

 

Image result for suja collaberations How Lawless Beauty Scores At Sephora By Expanding Clean Makeup's Reach ...     Image result for lawless beauy

Cold-Pressed Juice Brand – Suja Organic

Official | Lawless Beauty

Morgan Lerner and Annie Slabotsky- GoNanas

Have you ever recalled the last time you had a good slice of banana bread? Was the banana bread really good and was it healthy for you too? Well, if your banana bread wasn’t super good or healthy for you, GoNanas has you covered! GoNanas is banana bread that’s actually good for you and it’s also gluten free, vegan, and allergen friendly. How many banana bread companies can you think of that can hit all these points? Not many brands target all these points, and most banana bread aren’t always gluten free either. GoNanas was founded by Morgan Lerner and Annie Slabotsky, when they were freshmen in college at the University of Michigan. They both noticed the lack of how there weren’t a lot of healthy food options on campus and they both also loved banana bread. They began their journey by creating a banana bread recipe that was healthy, and it took them three years to get it just right. After they perfected the recipe, they started selling single-serve loaves around their campus and Michigan. They both moved to Chicago after graduating but the pandemic forced them to close indefinitely. They had a lot of ingredients left over in their inventory and a bunch of customers that missed the banana bread. So, Morgan and Annie came out with a new product line of banana bread mixes just as banana bread became the “official comfort food of the Coronavirus.” They soon launched their product with Nordstrom Rack and went viral on social media. GoNanas was featured in Forbes, Buzzfeed, and even USA Today!

Standard Size Baking MixesBut what else makes GoNanas unique? They are a women-owned startup, and they help to empower other small business owners! They also swapped out artificial and refined ingredients for healthier and simpler alternatives that make their banana bread taste even better! They also now sell different banana bread flavor mixes like birthday cake, cinnamon roll, strawberry caramel, and more! They even launched some cookie mixes like lemon shortbread and chocolate chip! You can find more about their delicious products here!

Sources:

Morgan Lerner and Annie Slabotsky of GoNanas: Five Things I Learned As a TwentySomething Founder | by Jerome Knyszewski | Authority Magazine | Medium

About | GoNanas – GoNanas (eatgonanas.com)

Our Story – GoNanas (eatgonanas.com)

Plushies With Pocket Powers

In 2013, two sisters set out to create a product they never would have seen themselves selling. Sydney and Toni Loew are the founders of Poketti. What is a Poketti? A Poketti is defined in their website as, “A plushie with pocket powers.” According to their website, Poketti means many pockets. The family business started when Sydney Leow took an entrepreneurship class in 7th grade. Sydney and her team had brainstormed the idea of a plushie in that class. But the plushie kingdom did not stop there! Sydney was inspired and wanted to create her own plushie with a pocket for convivence to store treasures. She consulted with her parents, who are designers, and her sister, who became her business partner. The small idea in a 7th grade entrepreneur class became a family business idea. Each plushie has its own name and style. For example, Sydney the Penguin, Toni the Bunny, Roxi the Kitty and Baxter the Puppy are all part of their series 1 launch, and the first four plushies they created. In the summer of 2013, they launched a 30-day Kickstarter campaign and raised $20,000 for the initial order of Poketti plushies. Since 2013, they have continued to be successful. Poketti has attended several trade shows and direct sales events. They have even produced a tv commercial. Poketti has spoken at many schools and clubs, inspiring young kids their age to chase an idea. Poketti has also received multiple awards. In 2016, Sydney and Toni were named Wonder Girls at the annual Women in Toys award gala. Sydney represented Poketti at the AGG Silicon Valley Grow Awards at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Poketti also received an honor for Innovative Branding at the annual ICON HONORS event. Throughout the years Poketti has been growing and growing. They even expanded their company to Walmart! Who knew that lives would be changed from a 7th grade class. Poketti Plushies with Pocket Powers Series2 Parker the Owl

Check out the Poketti website here!

 

Frasier Lipton: Crafting a Big Impact Through the Little Things

Frasier Sterling began as a small gem in Frasier Lipton’s apartment, a mere side hustle Lipton gradually scaled, using materials of increasing quality and quantity, as her customer base grew beyond her expectations. In remarkable timing, she found herself “working until 2 am for years to keep up” with the demand for her products; according to Forbes, Frasier Sterling has “grown over 100% YoY [year on year; annually] since inception.” She realized she needed to scale up her production methods—and her confidence in the business’ success—when the flow of business “hit an inflection point” around 2015 “and wasn’t manageable anymore.”

Two years later, when Frasier Sterling had long lined the shelves of major retail distributors, Lipton noticed that retailers took advantages of such dependent businesses and recognized a landslide that could occur to her own business when other brands such as Nasty Gal filed bankruptcy. She responded by shifting Sterling into a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand, distributing products directly to customers online.

Lipton has been driven by the vision of creating jewelry akin to the candy-bracelet and dainty charm-necklace wonderland central to most young women’s childhoods, expressing that she loves to “make pieces Bella and Gigi Hadid, Sofia Richie and Madison Beer wear but everyone else can also afford. I try to keep Frasier Sterling light, fun and feel good — I always say if it can be described with an emoji, I know it’ll be a hit!” Lipton has kept this centrality in the Web, investing in online advertising as opposed to in-person campaigns and functions, a strategy which aligns to Lipton’s target market of the current ‘net-engrossed generation.

Regarding her view of the success of Frasier Sterlig, Lipton harkens back to the brand’s prioritization of customer feedback in every step of the business’s trajectory, stating of her customers that “they’re so interactive, vocal and always telling us what they like and don’t like. We know our customers so well and really lean on them when it comes to product design, collaborations, the type of content we are putting out and even the deals we run — and I think this a big factor in why our retention rate is so high compared to industry standard.”

As a recent facet of this trajectory, Lipton has striven to tune in to the voices of young women beyond her customer base, partnering with nonprofit Girls Inc. to offer mentorship to young women in impoverished conditions, driving positive growth in people’s lives at a young age and ensuring that bright and innovative women like Frasier Lipton have the opportunities to act on their motivations and fulfill their dreams as well.