I co-founded SOLÈS for L'Oréal Brandstorm 2026, a global student marketing competition where teams pitch original beauty innovations to L'Oréal executives. In under three months, my team built a full product concept, pricing model, and go-to-market strategy around a single insight: luxury doesn't have to mean impractical. SOLÈS is a dual-ended compact combining a luxury fragrance balm on one end and SPF 50 mineral protection on the other.

The brief asked us to innovate in the luxury beauty space. My team split almost immediately on what "luxury" meant. I looked at it from a consumer behavior angle. Sunscreen reapplication rates are notoriously low because the product is inconvenient to carry mid-day. The portable skincare category was growing 35% annually, and yet most dual-function products felt like drugstore compromises. That gap was our opening.

I pushed the team toward a different definition of luxury: something so well-designed it earns a permanent place in your bag. Not luxury as status. Luxury as quality you rely on.

The brand name came from a brainstorm around the idea of solace. SOLÈS sounds like solace — warmth, relief. For a product designed to protect your skin and make you feel put-together on the go, that resonance mattered as much as the specs.

SOLÈS sits in a deliberate white space between mass-market multitasking products and traditional luxury single-use fragrance. The $35–$40 retail price sits just below the "luxury intimidation threshold." By pivoting to a high-end refillable glass model, we increase customer LTV and brand loyalty through an exclusive, recurring refill ecosystem. The $20–$25 refill drives a projected 30% repurchase rate — each refill sale is higher-margin, keeps the customer in the ecosystem, and compounds brand loyalty over time. All projections are based on market research from the Brandstorm submission.

• → Reframing the brief was the whole game. The most interesting marketing insight challenges the premise, not just the execution.
• → Retention should be designed into the product. The refill model was both a sustainability play and a revenue driver at once.
• → I would have run primary consumer research earlier. First-party willingness-to-pay data at $35–$40 would have made the pricing argument more defensible.

Quirk Haus is a NYC creative retail space that incubates and sells products from local small brands. I joined as Sales Marketing Manager in December 2025 and took on the challenge of promoting 10+ different brands simultaneously through a single social media presence, while managing the B2B side directly with brand partners.

The core tension at Quirk Haus is that you're not selling one cohesive brand. You're selling 10 at once. A generic social feed that tries to serve everyone resonates with no one. Foot traffic that did convert tended to come from people who had already seen something specific on social media and came in looking for it.

Reels became the primary format. I tracked which products generated in-store mentions using our Clover POS system alongside weekly sales reports from each brand partner. On the B2B side, commission rates were negotiable up to 50% of total sales, so I needed to understand each brand's margin structure before setting terms.

Estimated contribution to visibility growth based on Clover POS attribution and social analytics.

• → Aspirational content drives awareness. Product-specific content drives foot traffic. They are not the same job.
• → Managing multiple brands under one roof taught me how to build a cohesive editorial voice that still gave each brand room to breathe.
• → A UTM-linked QR code system tied to each post would make the social-to-sales connection far more precise and reportable.

Ablean was a venture I co-founded and served as Chief Strategy Officer for during The Ground Floor, Fordham's Gabelli School startup course. The premise was simple: NYC has 65 million annual visitors and a genuinely broken public restroom infrastructure. Ablean's solution was to stop trying to build new facilities and instead unlock the ones that already exist inside cafes and small businesses through a membership app. This was my idea, brought to the team after we started from scratch looking for an everyday problem worth solving.

The urban restroom access problem is not a construction problem. A single traditional public restroom costs $3–$5 million to build in NYC. The existing digital solutions weren't solving it either. Google Maps shows you where a restroom might be. It does not guarantee that restroom is clean, open, or accessible to a non-customer. That's the gap.

I focused our competitive positioning on one word: guaranteed. Every competitor either can't guarantee access or requires millions in construction to do it.

The financial model projected $1.13M in Year 1 revenue at 0.5% adoption. Break-even projected between Month 9 and Month 10 with a 30% monthly user growth rate and 40-location starting network. All figures are projections from our business plan model.

12-Month Cash Flow Projection — Break-Even by Month 10

• → The best business ideas solve something people encounter every day but have accepted as unsolvable.
• → Pricing for multiple user types is harder than it looks. A tourist paying $1 and a commuter paying $5 per month need to feel equally well-served.
• → Real data from even 10 partner locations would tell us a lot about actual visit frequency and whether $0.10 per visit sustains long-term partner commitment.