Woman Owned Startup Archives - Page 5 of 5

Seattle Startup: Joey Bra, A Bra For Holding Cell Phones, IDs And More

Whether you want to admit to it or not, or whether you think it’s classy or not, we all know someone or maybe you are that someone, who when you need to hold something fit for a pocket and have a nice skirt on or no pocket yoga pants, you’ve resorted to putting it in your bra. Maybe it was a little cash, maybe your drivers license or credit card, perhaps your cell phone. Well now there’s bras made specifically for that. It’s called the Joey Bra.

Mariah Gentry and Kyle Barlow are the co-founders of Joey Bra. These innovative bras include pockets that align with the side of the body capable of holding your cell phone, some cash, maybe your IDs, and they do it without drawing attention to the bra itself.

Geekwire’s Rebecca Lowell was one of 200 judges at the UW business plan competition. She stumbled upon this innovative new startup the moment she walked through the door. She took notice to the model wearing nothing but a bra up top, a Joey Bra.

This isn’t some gimmicky idea. Gentry is a NASA Space grant student with a double major in entrepreneurship and environmental science. She also was a finalist in the Wells Fargo Case Competition. She met co-founder Barlow at UW’s Foster School of Business.

The duo is targeting college students and offers two models a strapless version and an 8 way convertible strap version. Lowell reported that her only concern was the access to the items in the compartments and moisture as the result of perspiration. No worries as one of the co-founders works at REI and they’ve already been sourcing water proof materials.

Linkage:

Source: Geekwire

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Toronto Startup: Quimby Technolgies Creates Self Destructing Mobile Messaging

Have you ever been in a relationship and maybe sent a naughty message or two, possibly with a picture? Did you live to regret that message when you broke up with that person? Now we’re not talking about kids or teenagers and sexting here, real adults do this kind of thing, especially those that travel a lot. Maybe you had a really rip roaring night at the club and sent a bunch of photos to your posse, perhaps you wanted them to live the moment with you, but not on Monday morning back at the office. What about this, have you ever had an idea you may have wanted to share with some somewhat trusted colleagues, but just enough so they could grasp the idea, not steal it down the road?

If you’ve ever found yourself in one of those scenarios or millions of other similar types of situations than you’d be happy to know that Heather Burns and her Quimby Technologies, a Toronto Startup, has created a self destructing messaging platform. Burns teamed up with Alkarrim (Alex) Nasser of BNotions, to create Quimby Technologies and Quimby the self destructing messenger app.

Now Burns is pretty sharp, she is well aware that there are some people who are going to shout out at the rooftops why this is a bad idea. The same kind of people that can’t get over the fact that Craigslist or Zaarly exist, and in our exclusive interview we asked her about just those types.

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Chez Gourmet’s Burger Queen Takes Home Top Prize In Angel Oregon Competition

Yes this is a Veggie Burger by Chez Gourmet, you see why they won now huh?

A woman owned startup in Oregon has taken home the $250,000 first price in the Angel Oregon competition for her startup Chez Gourmet. Chez Gourmet is still considered in the startup stage despite the fact that founder Marie Osmuson first founded the company in 2006.

Osumuson created Chez Gourmet after a friend of hers, who is a well known local real estate agent, Barbara Durrett, sampled one of Osmuson’s veggie burgers at a family birthday party. Durrett encouraged Osmuson to try and sell her veggie burgers in local stores. Durrett also set Osmuson up with a food industry friend who agreed that the burgers were definitely good enough to sell. Durrett and Osmuson became business partners and their burgers started catching on.

Fast Forward to 2012 and Chez Gourmet has just taken home the top prize for the Angel Oregon competition. Chez Gourmet is expected t clear $2M in revenue this year and is on track to grow to $12M in revenue by 2015. Chez Gourmet was one of five companies to present yesterday at the Angel Oregon event held at Portland’s Governor Hotel.

A startup that makes social network analytics software called, Tellagence came in second place winning $94,000. The Portland Business Journal reports that this competition has been around since 2003. The 46 companies that have participated in the competition have generated $121 million in revenue and employ 741 people. They’ve also raised $81 million in venture capital and angel investment.

Here’s the linkage:

To find out more about Chez Gourmet visit their site here

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Source: Business Journal

Durham NC Startup: School House Apparel; Collegiate Home Grown Apparel With Purpose

Duke University Alum Rachel Weeks set out on a mission to create a line of fashion apparel that’s socially conscious. School House started when Weeks went to Sri Lanka in 2007 on a mission to build a socially responsible clothing company. She was able to do that with her first college t-shirt from her alma mater Duke University.

The first School House line was manufactured in Sri Lanka and it helped support a living wage factory there. While she was maintaining an ethically social responsible clothing line while using a living wage factory in Sri Lanka she found the opportunity to come full circle in 2011 and brought her clothing line back home to North Carolina, but that wasn’t before Weeks was able to triple the wages in that Sri Lankan factory.

While Weeks felt great about what she was doing for the Sri Lankan factory she found out later on that the factory had taken on more and more orders from other companies and the School House orders were getting pushed to the back. With an angel investment Weeks was able to hire textile and apparel expert Susan Williams who had over 25 years of experience with brands like Jockey, Levi Strauss and the Gap. The two of them together did a cost analysis and decided that home was where School House needed to be.

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Omaha Couple Launches Fertility Awareness Startup: Ova Ova

The first thing we thought when we heard about Ova Ova is that the fertility space is extremely crowded. One quick look in both the Google Play Store and the iTunes App Store revealed hundreds of apps for tracking fertility, and this couple still isn’t mobile, however they are putting a different spin on fertility tracking.

Omaha, Nebraska based Ova Ova was founded by 24-year-old Amanda Kohler and her husband Kevin. They set out to take fertility tracking sites out of the 80’s with their spreadsheets and line graphs and make the process a lot more aesthetically pleasing. The Kohler’s felt that other sites on the market now were not up to date with technology.

In an interview with SiliconPrairie Kohler said she had always wanted to start her own business but it wasn’t until an awkward encounter with a cattle rancher on an airplane that gave her the idea for Ova Ova. Kohler told Silicon Prairie that she was on a plane and asking the rancher if he used anything organic on his ranch. He said he didn’t. He then turned to her and asked if she used birth control. The rancher made the point that taking birth control and ingesting synthetic hormones daily was on a much more direct scale than eating commercially raised beef.

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NY Startup Birch Box Teams Up With Gossip Girl XO XO

Birchbox is a women owned startup in New York that’s received a lot of traction. They are a monthly subscription club where their club members receive a box every month filled with the latest and greatest in cosmetics and pampering gear.

Subscription based clubs have been great for people with a hustle and bustle lifestyle. Nowadays you can find a subscription club for everything from shoes, to fashion, to cosmetics. We even profiled Chicago based KlutchClub earlier this year, they offer health and wellness products monthly.

Birchbox had two major pieces of news this week. First off they’ve introduced the Birch Box for men which comes complete with colognes, after shaves, and other pampering products that men love (but sometimes don’t like to shop for).

Their other announcement is that they’ve teamed up with the CW hit show “Gossip Girl” for their season finale.

The May Birchbox theme is “Gossip Girl” Birchbox founders Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna have teamed up with Amy Tagliamotti the shows department head for makeup and Jennifer Johnson the shows department head for hair. Tagliamotti and Johnson helped inspire the treats that will be in this months Birchbox.

“We’re all really big fans of Gossip Girl,” Beauchamp told Betabeat.com “The idea was to help the audience basically engage deeper with the show by getting a look into some of the looks from the show.”

Gossip Girl chronicles the lives of the upper east sides debutantes and their soap opera centric lives. “Gossip Girl” is a secretive blogger who posts the gossip that’s happening around the shows main characters. It airs on the CW network and is about to go on their season break.

source: Betabeat

Infographic Suggests Just 5% Of Startups Founded By Women

We’ve featured some really great women led startups lately here at nibletz. We brought you the story of KlutchClub in Chicago and it’s founder Julia Bashkin. We also recently featured Y-Combinator startup 99dresses and their Aussie woman founder Nikki Durkin and more.

According to the infographic below, published by IT Manager Daily, 56% of professional jobs in the U.S are held by women. However in IT just 25% of jobs are held by women. Then there’s the startups. According to the infographic only 5% of startups are currently founded by women. This may be in dispute though as women seem to be more and more involved in starting their own businesses. In ABC’s “The Shark Tank” it seems that a lot more than 5% of those startups presented are founded by women.

We’ll be featuring more and more of the best startups from around the country and we’re sure we’ll see more than 5% are led by women.

20 Year Old Bubbly Aussie Woman Debuts 99 Dresses At Y-Combinator

20 year old Nikki Durkin wants you to shop and sell in her infinite closet, 99dresses.com

20 year old Nikki Durkin is looking to solve a problem potentially affecting hundreds of millions of women across the globe. The problem, their are too many clothes in her closet. As Durkin explains in her pitch video, she has all these clothes and nothing to wear. That’s where the idea for 99dresses came from, and it came to her when she was just 16 years old at an Australian boarding school for girls.

As Business Insider reports, naturally at an all girls school Durkin was swapping clothes all the time. High school and college girls are accustomed to borrowing each others clothes. So when Durkin graduated from high school she wanted to expand on the idea of girlfriends swapping clothes on a much larger scale.

99dresses uses virtual currency called buttons. A woman who wants to sell a dress, pair of pants, blouse or other piece of clothing, puts it up on the site and instead of getting paid cash, she sets a price in buttons. When she sells her piece of clothing the buttons change hands and the seller pays for shipping. Now the seller has buttons to buy or virtually rent clothes.

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Start Up Spotlight: Chicago’s Klutch Club, Health & Wellness Delivered To Your Door Monthly

Companies like Shoe Dazzle and Sole Society revolutionized a new concept for busy people. These two companies send their “club members” a new, stylish pair of shoes every month. The shoes are roughly based on questions you submit when you join and most users are finding they get very stylish shoes.

The “of the month club” industry has expanded to cosmetics, purses, and now health and wellness. Klutch Club is a woman owned start up based in Chicago. Founder Julie Bashkin.

Klutch Club was built on Bashkin’s background as an engagement manager at McKinsey and Company. In that position she served packaged goods and retail clients and noticed that her clients were struggling to engage customers in a multi-channel way and hardly any had a digital presence.

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