Entrepreneurship
My entrepreneurship journey began growing up with parents who together built a medical practice in the health space. With a surgeon as my father and a nurse as my mother, I grew up learning how to build a business. I innately then gravitated to the world of entrepreneurship. From working in tech at Reebok in 1999, to new product development in the tech, fitness and CPG space in the early 2000’s, to launching my own startups over the past decade, I have always lived and breathed entrepreneurship. Below are a few startups I have built or worked on.
Community & Female-Focused
Veda Grace is a tele-med startup in the beauty and skincare sector. As the CMO, I led the brand development and go-to-market strategy for this seed stage startup. We participated and came in 5th place at The Chicago Booth Polsky New Venture Challenge, one of the top 3 pitch competitions in the country and also made it to second round Shark Tank auditions.
In 2014, I launched Blazin’ Babes, a women’s professional networking community. What began as helping women in their career transition, soon transformed into helping female founders launch and scale their startups. Our community platform provides resources, workshops, speaker series and networking events for female founders.
Service
Strategic Prep is an MBA admissions startup. I founded Strategic Prep in 2008 recognizing that international students lacked the knowledge nor the understanding of how to apply to business school in the United States. Due to my experience in marketing and brand strategy, in addition to my experience as a Bowdoin College alumni interview volunteer and Chicago Booth MBA admissions student team member, I saw an unmet need and built my third startup helping prospective MBA’s get into the top MBA programs.
In 2007, after my daughter was born, I left the corporate world and launched a strategy and marketing consulting business helping founders and small businesses build and scale. This led to working for Radio Flyer and a few other businesses, helping them with innovation and new product development.
Media & Entertainment
Chuggington is a brand licensing train property that includes a 3G animation TV series on The Disney Channel, books, media, movies, toys, video games and other licensing properties that depict the adventures of Coco, Brewster and Wilson, three trains that encounter challenges and learn lessons on how to overcome them through lessons in the world of “Chuggington”. In 2008, I was part of a 10-person startup team and led the creation of the brand licensing Style Guide that allows licensees to license the brand. This was my first time working in the licensing industry with a focus on media and entertainment.