5 founders who changed careers to launch small, independent brands
Ever dreamed of changing careers to launch your own brand? Meet 5 entrepreneurs who have done it. “Career Change” is one of the many filters we have on Mytus under the “Founder Story” grouping, helping you to discover brand stories you love. Read them all and be inspired for the brand you’ll launch one day.
in2green
in2green is an eco-luxury brand producing blankets, throws, and other textiles from recycled tshirts and plastic bottles. They offer personalization and have won awards for their innovative textiles. Throws from $165. Ponchos from $110.
Stefanie Zelding and Lori Slater are the founders of in2green. “Our husbands were college buddies,” Slater told Serendipity Social. “Their connection proved fortuitous, what with Zeldin’s background in sustainable textiles, and Slater’s background in retail and interior design.”
A 2017 Venture Mom article reported that “When the couples got together, the two women always talked about starting a business together. They loved the idea of reusability and repurposing things to a higher level.” In the brand’s 2016 video The In2Green Story, Slater says: “She (Zelding) was in sustainability textiles, and I was in retail and design. I think it’s just a marriage of those two interests and the desire to create product gave birth to in2green.”
Read the full In2Green story on Mytus.
YOGO
YOGO Folding Yoga Mats have won several awards for their clean, portable and grippy design, and they are ranked #1 travel yoga mat by top bloggers. The mats are made with natural rubber from trees and also one food-producing tree is planted in Africa per mat purchased. Yoga mats from $62
She founded YOGO in order to take a more hands-on approach to sustainability, leveraging design tools to clean up supply chains in yoga. The company’s mission is to develop greener supply chains in yoga hardgoods, while elevating yogis yoga practice. It uses a cradle-to-cradle and circular economy approach to material production and disposal.
Read the full YOGO story on Mytus.
Le Mondeur
Le Mondeur is a shoe brand, and each of its collections spotlights a textile from an artisan group around the world. Founded by a former human rights lawyer who loves to travel and discover artisans of the world. Sandals and shoes from $125-$285.
Le Mondeur founder Jessica Singer is a former lawyer who grew up near Lake Tahoe, California. She is introduced on the brand’s website: “Jessica received a degree in International Relations from Brown University and a law degree from UCLA. For over a decade, she has worked on human rights issues both abroad and at home, focusing primarily on issues of gender-based violence.” A spotlight in the Brown Alumni Magazine from 2019 includes that she was the first person in her family to go to college.
She founded Le Mondeur as “an extension of her love of adventure and connecting with people across cultures through travel” according to the brand’s site.
Read the full Le Mondeur story on Mytus.
ABLE
ABLE is a Nashville-based fashion brand producing women’s bags, shoes, apparel and jewelry. The brand is devoted to employing and empowering women as a solution to end poverty. They employ women both locally in Nashville and in developing countries around the world, and are transparent about safety, equality, and wages. Prices range from $40 t-shirt to $350 for a leather jacket
Founder Barret Ward is quoted in a 2018 Forbes interview: “In my early 30s, I was a district sales manager for a publishing company in Nashville, TN” when his wife’s job moved them to Ethiopia. According to the brand’s website, “While living in Ethiopia Barrett Ward saw firsthand how extreme poverty forced young women, generation after generation, to resort to prostitution as a means of supporting themselves and their families.
“The goal was to provide an alternative that would provide these women with the opportunity to earn a living, empowering them to end the cycle of poverty that kept them trapped. Armed with multiple studies illustrating how the employment of women benefits and strengthens an entire community, the ABLE team set out on a mission to end generational poverty, one job at a time.”
Read the full ABLE story on Mytus.
Teddy Locks
Sustainable sock company Teddy Locks makes men’s and women’s socks out of trash! Designed in New York, and made in North Carolina, all of their socks are made from recycled plastic bottles and textile waste, helping to reduce landfill and ocean pollution. The founder switched careers from wildlife television production after seeing the damage human consumption was having on the planet. Socks from $16
“When I started a career in wildlife television production, all of my dreams came true,” says founder Samantha Tollworthy in the 2019 Teddy Locks brand story video. “But there was a major problem. On TV, the natural world was being shown as beautiful, rich and diverse. Yet behind the lens, I was seeing a different reality: habitats were being destroyed, animals were dying, and people were suffering. All for the things that we consume….So I thought, what if there was a way to reduce the footprint of our consumption without us even knowing?”
Tollworthy, originally from the UK and now living in New York City, shares more about her career change and her passion for protecting the planet in her blog post “TV Producer to Sock Production”: “I had been sharing [climate] facts for years, refusing straws and hoarding metal forks at my desk. But habits around me weren’t changing….Every day millions of people in Manhattan were picking up lunch or a coffee to go, and the piles of waste were overflowing from every trash can….It was at this point I realized that as creatures of habit we simply needed the products we were already buying to just be better. And this was when I decided I was going to make a sock company — a sustainable one, with socks better than any other, that are too good to refuse, and that would in turn force other brands to change their production methods.”
Originally published at https://www.mytus.co.
