Ravenswood startup helps retailers customize INNOVATION – ON YOUR DEVICE
Who would have thought the Kardashians would be the impetus for a woman-owned Ravenswood tech firm winning a coveted Women 2.0 award and a year’s work opportunity with cosmetics company L’Oreal USA?
The local startup, Citizen Made (Citizenmade.co), founded by Rachel Brooks and Bryn McCoy, provides Chicago’s locally owned and small-sized retailers an affordable platform from which to sell personalized products — not just so customers can pick a certain color, for example, but so they can fully design the product they want.
This column, Sun-Times’ Digital Second City Scene, broke the news about Citizen Made and its business model July 6.
Brooks, 25, and software engineer McCoy, 37, believe their company’s software platform can revolutionize retailing and consumer products in two ways: Letting small, independent shops gain access to what are now multimilliondollar “customizer” machines that let sneaker buyers fashion their own shoes, and enable shoppers to fashion just about anything they want for competitive prices.
That’s what L’Oreal’s next-generation customers want, too: The ability to customize products to accentuate their unique style and ingenuity, said Rachel Weiss, vice president of digital strategy and chair of L’Oreal USA Women in Digital.
“The Kardashians have helped create this idea that everyone can be a star and can brand herself,” Weiss said. “We are interested not only in the customization of products, but also of packaging.
“To ensure we have the right return-on-investment and profitand-loss financials in creating these customized products, how do we create products at mass and still be profitable? That’s an important area [in which] to wrap our brains around,” Weiss said.
L’Oreal partnered with Women 2.0, a San Francisco-based media company that aims to increase the number of female founders of tech- nology startups, on the Women 2.0 “Pitch” Conference and Competition on Nov. 20 in New York City.
At the contest, Chicago’s Citizen Made, founded in Fall 2011, won the L’Oreal USA Women in Digital’s Choice Award — the year’s-long work opportunity, plus a $25,000 grant and shoulder-rubbing opportunities with L’Oreal’s venture partners and professional mentors.
McCoy, Citizen Made’s chief technology officer, said the prize will allow the company to use its customization canvas to “think through places” throughout L’Oreal’s business divisions where customization “would be a key asset.”
L’Oreal sees venture capital as a key issue for women.
“Fewer than 10 percent of venture capital investors are women,” said L’Oreal’s Weiss. “Fewer than 7 percent of startups are led and operated by women.”
Rudina Seseri, partner at earlystage venture capital fund Fairhaven Capital and a member of L’Oreal USA Women in Digital’s advisory board, said women are proving adept at starting consumer-oriented companies, but still lag in engineering and hard-science skills.
Femanomics research shows 88 women-founded startups in Chicago raised a combined $49.64 million in funding in 2012, up 8.97 percent from 2011.
Citizen Made’s co-founders prove that women are gaining status:
† McCoy made Forbes magazine’s list of six “New Female CTOs of Startups” — where she described herself as a “wild at heart creative type” and a technophiliac.
† Brooks was named among the Dell #Inspire 100 list in the entrepreneur category as a “world changer.”
† Citizen Made won the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association’s $15,000 Digital Startup Initiative grant.