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.
Its really awesome to see all the things that Maya is involved with and the integrity with which she conducts her business ventures and structures her ideas. It’s also super awesome to see that she started all this when she was so young and has stuck with it!