I co-founded SOLÈS for L'Oréal Brandstorm 2026, a global student marketing competition where teams pitch original beauty innovations directly 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 that combines 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. Some teammates went straight to premium perfume. I kept pushing back. 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. Nothing had cracked the combination of genuine luxury sensory experience with daily-use practicality. That gap was our opening.

I pushed the team toward a different definition of luxury: something so well-designed that 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. It carries warmth and relief. For a product designed to protect your skin and make you feel put-together on the go, that emotional 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. Mass-market options are functional but carry no prestige signal. Traditional luxury houses sell fragrance and SPF separately at full price, with no daily convenience story. SOLÈS targets the 20-to-35 consumer who shops at Sephora, wants efficacy and portability, and considers sustainability a baseline expectation. The $35 to $40 retail price sits just below the "luxury intimidation threshold" while the $20 to $25 refill model drives a projected 30% repurchase rate. That repurchase rate is the core business driver. Each refill sale is higher-margin than the original unit, keeps the customer in the ecosystem, and compounds brand loyalty over time. All financial projections are estimates based on market research and competitive benchmarking from the Brandstorm submission.

~ = partial   ✓ = full capability   ✗ = not offered

• → 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 to $40 would have made the pricing argument significantly more defensible to judges.

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 job required two completely different marketing modes running at the same time.

The core tension at Quirk Haus is that you're not selling one cohesive brand. You're selling 10 at once. Each partner brand has its own identity, customer base, and product story. 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.

I decided early on that the most powerful thing I could do on social media was prove that specific products were available in the store right now. Not aesthetic brand content. Content that showed real products people could walk in and buy that day.

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. That combination let me connect social content performance to actual sales movement. 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.

Sales grew 30% over the period I've been in this role, tracked through POS data and partner sales reports. Brand visibility grew 40% as measured through social analytics. The clearest signal: customers came in specifically asking for products they saw in Reels. I managed B2B relationships with 10+ brand partners simultaneously.

• → 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.
• → If I could improve one thing: a UTM-linked QR code system tied to each post would make the social-to-sales connection far more precise and reportable to brand partners.

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. I brought it 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 to $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.

As Chief Strategy Officer, my job was to figure out how Ablean could scale quickly, compete against free alternatives like Google Maps, and convince small business owners to participate. I focused our competitive positioning on one word: guaranteed.

The two people Ablean had to solve for are not the same person, and I built the pricing model with that in mind.

The first is the tourist. She flies into JFK, walks through Chelsea, and has the problem every visitor in NYC has: she needs a restroom and there is nothing available that she can actually use without buying a $7 coffee she doesn't want. For her, $1 for single-use access is an instant, frictionless yes. She opens the app, sees a verified restroom 0.2 miles away with a 4.5-star cleanliness rating, pays with Apple Pay, and the smart lock releases. The entire friction of that experience is gone.

The second is the daily commuter. He takes the subway from Brooklyn to Midtown five days a week and runs into the same problem multiple times per week. For him, $1 per use adds up fast. The $5 monthly membership is the answer. It costs him less than a subway ride and solves a problem he has every single day. These two people have different friction points and different mental models for what "affordable" means. The pricing tiers reflect two completely different relationships with the product.

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. This project forced me to think through the full stack of a go-to-market strategy: customer definition, pricing for multiple behaviors, channel strategy, and a business model that serves both users and partners simultaneously.

• → The best business ideas solve something people encounter every day but have accepted as unsolvable. The restroom problem is so normalized that most people don't think of it as a business opportunity. That's exactly why it was one.
• → 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.