Dear Sustainability Panel attendees,
After careful consideration of the events over the past weekend and this week, we feel it is best to reschedule tomorrow night's panel.
As excited as we are for this event, we don't feel that it is appropriate to focus on the topic this week. We are spending the week supporting the #BlackLivesMatter movement - if you are interested in joining us and need help with places to start, check out our list of compiled Anti-Racism Resources: https://bit.ly/2XIM9C6
We appreciate your understanding, and hope to reschedule sometime soon. If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Thank you,
Team FFF
On Thursday June 4th, we are bringing together four women creating businesses around reusable packaging, combating fashion pollution, and helping consumers towards lower-waste lifestyles to discuss their views on sustainability in our post-coronavirus world.
Join us for a virtual panel discussion with founders Lauren Singer of Package Free, Sarah Paiji Yoo of Blueland, Samantha Elias of The Vintage Twin, and Steph Hon of Cadence to hear how COVID has affected their strategies, ways we can all work towards a more sustainable lifestyle in our new normal, and their vision for brands of the future.
Lauren Singer is Founder and CEO of Package Free, a company on a mission to make the world less trashy by offering products that help you reduce waste daily. She is also founder of the leading Zero Waste editorial platform Trash is for Tossers which shows that living a low or zero waste lifestyle can be cost effective, accessible, and fun. An Environmental Studies graduate from NYU, former Sustainability Manager at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, and popularizer and pioneer of the Zero Waste Movement, the amount of trash that she has produced over the past eight years can fit inside of a 16 oz mason jar. Lauren has empowered millions to reduce their waste and has kept over 100 million pieces of trash out of landfills through her work at Package Free. Her work has been profiled by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, New York Magazine, MSNBC, NBC, AOL, CNN, Yahoo, Fox Business, BBC, and NPR amongst others.
Sarah Paiji Yoo is CEO and Co-Founder of Blueland, a company that is reimagining cleaning products to eliminate single-use plastic packaging. Sarah is a serial retail entrepreneur passionate about sustainability and innovation. Prior to Blueland, she was a Partner at LAUNCH, a leading startup studio, and launched and operated several consumer brands including M.Gemi, Rockets of Awesome and Follain. She was previously co-founder and CEO of Snapette, the largest mobile platform for local fashion shopping, which was sold to leading e-commerce platform Pricegrabber in 2013. Sarah most recently was featured on this season's Shark Tank and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Forbes, Time, InStyle and Glamour. She attended Harvard College and Harvard Business School and currently lives in New York City with her 3-year-old son Noah and husband Ken.
Steph Hon is an entrepreneur building products for a more sustainable future. After 2.5 years of development, 250 investor pitches, and over 200 prototypes, she founded her first company, Cadence, in 2019. Through a commitment to sustainability, individuality, and intuitive design that works, Cadence creates products that help you move — because you do it all. Cadence’s mission is to make it easy to bring everything with you, starting with your personal care products. The company’s first product, the Cadence Capsule, launched in January 2020, and sold out within the first ten days. To date, Steph has raised $400K in seed funding, from angel investors including Ben Zises (Quip), Small Girls PR, and a number of other founders.
Samantha is the CEO of The Vintage Twin, the world’s first vintage brand. While studying business and sustainability at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, she started the brand alongside her sister Morgan with the goal of creating easy access to reliably-cool, premium vintage that would blur the lines between resale and retail. Over the last 10 years, she has bootstrapped domain expertise, supply chain advantages, organic brand equity and proprietary technology that position The Vintage Twin to raise outside capital for the first time and expand into e-commerce.
Anu Duggal is the Founding Partner of Female Founders Fund, the pre-eminent early-stage fund investing in female-founded technology companies. Since its founding in 2014, Female Founders Fund has raised two funds and invested in over 40 of the fastest growing female-led technology companies nationwide. Anu has been honored in Fortune’s “40 Under 40" List in 2018 and Crain’s “Notable Women In Tech” list in 2019, as well as praised for her efforts in starting a movement to diversify venture capital. Anu and Female Founders Fund have been featured in leading media outlets including “TODAY”, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC Squawk Alley and Inc., and she is a regular co-host on Yahoo!'s digital finance show, Midday Movers.