Wear it Wise Campaign Leaders: Who’s Who Get to know the cohort for the 2018 Wear it Wise Campaign
Alex Marchyshyn is a first-year dual Master of Environmental Management and MBA candidate at Duke University focused on the intersection of business, the environment and supply chain. Her goal is to work in the apparel industry to ensure that the clothes we wear are not destroying our planet. She became interested in sustainable fashion after reading the book “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion” by Elizabeth Cline – an eye-opening book that galvanized her to completely rethink her habits and closet. Alex’s particular passion is how to apply the principles of circular economy to the design and end-of-life of clothing. In her spare time, she loves discovering new sustainable apparel brands and reading as many books on the subject as she can get her hands on.
Alexandria Lee is currently a Global Planning Analyst at Gap Inc, and is also pursuing an MS degree in Sustainability Management at Columbia University. She hopes to combine her academic and professional background in supply chain and corporate retail with new knowledge gained from her graduate degree to venture into a career in sustainable fashion. At work, she has taken the initiative to lend her inventory management expertise to the Environmental Affairs team by creating a tool that streamlines the data collection and interpretation process across all divisions, to quantify the fiscal and environmental savings associated with a water-savings program. Outside of work, Alex stays engaged in the sustainable fashion community – last year, through Net Impact NYC, she volunteered as a sustainability consultant for Project Just, a web-based company that promotes responsible shopping through an educational web interface. She hopes to continue to learn more about sustainable fashion, while seeking more opportunities to translate her learnings to teach others about the benefits of implementing a sustainable framework.
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Ashley Kongs is a first year MBA candidate at George Washington University where she focuses on sustainability, corporate responsibility and sustainable supply chains. An avid knitter, she has long had an interest in the creation of apparel and accessories- leading to her desire to combine her interest in fashion with her past experience in global sustainability project management into a career in CSR and sustainability within the apparel sector. At GWSB, she currently serves as Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability for the MBA Association, President of the Women’s MBA Association, and is an active member of Net Impact. Her ultimate post-MBA goal is to work with fashion companies and their contractors to implement sustainability reporting structures that encourage fair and safe labor practices, environmentally responsible production and sourcing processes, and investment in technologies that allow the apparel industry to reduce its global impact.
Camille Forde is a second year MBA student at UC-Berkeley Haas. She’s passionate about conscious consumption and helping women adopt sustainable wardrobes. She writes about these topics on her blog, www.thesamepg.com. While in business school, she’s consulted US and UK based sustainable fashion startups on their go-to-market strategy, channel strategy, and brand positioning. In her free time, she’s likely meeting up with local women entrepreneurs in retail or eating her way through all the ice-cream shops in Oakland.
Camille Hope is a sophomore at Santa Clara University double majoring in Marketing and Spanish with a minor in International Business. She has interests in the global market and its many factors that play a role in how countries interact, but also the impact it creates on our environment. Naturally, Camille has a keen sense for fashion and aesthetic that strongly influences her attention to the huge carbon footprint that the fashion industry alone creates. In finding new styles and staple pieces in her wardrobe, she loves thrifting and upcycling already used clothing in order to minimize her own effect on the environment. In her career, her goal is to create a positive effect on the world and to use sustainability as a means to do it. The Wear it Wise campaign event is one of her first steps in getting started to create a difference in an industry that every person utilizes.
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Cory Skuldt will complete her MBA this spring with a focus on sustainability strategy. For her capstone, she is working with brand and supply chain clients to enable circularity in fashion and textiles. She also has a research focus on the role of impact investing in improving fashion industry sustainability. After a decade working in apparel resale and waste-to-resource initiatives on a local level, the Bard MBA has been a transformative experience, growing her professional acumen and increasing the scale of her impact. She currently divides her time between consulting and a sustainability position with her local school district, and is exploring opportunities to work within a brand or larger consultancy after graduation.
Danielle L. Vermeer is a creative strategist and strategic creative passionate about the intersection of technology, business, and fashion. She is currently a second year MBA at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and is a leader in her local Net Impact Club. Prior to the MBA, Danielle was a strategist on corporate social responsibility and sustainability issues for the world's largest aerospace company, as well as a social impact consultant for Fortune 500 companies and large nonprofit organizations. She is obsessed with how technology can improve the customer experience with fashion and promote greater transparency in apparel supply chains. Outside of the MBA, you can find Danielle hosting clothing swaps, designing new multi-functional apparel products, and spending time with her family.
Griffin Klement is a former digital advertising account executive, looking to return to marketing after four years serving as the Latin American Project Director of the Organic Consumers Association, an international NGO representing a network of over 2 million organic consumers with projects in Mexico. To facilitate his return to business, Griffin is currently an MBA Candidate at Texas A&M specializing in marketing and entrepreneurship. Griffin has spent the past six years developing his skills as a digital campaign manager and international program director where he successfully managed and built from the ground up a variety of projects, campaigns and organizations focused on the organic food and farming industry. One of the last campaigns Griffin worked on prior to attending graduate school was the Care What You Wear campaign, which was designed to increase public awareness about the impact of the fashion, textile, and fiber industries on the environment.
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Jen Sharkey works as a Master Tailor and Designer for Levi Strauss & Co. while also pursuing her MBA at Mills College. In her spare time she enjoys sewing and repairing her own clothes. Her interest lies in exploring the distinction between consumption and intentional use of our garments, as well as how we can educate and empower people to make intentional wardrobe choices. Jen plans to use her years of experience in sewing, dyeing, and embellishing clothes to hold hands-on educational workshops as her main Wear It Wise campaign event.
Lauren Menzer is a Master's Candidate at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. She has previously researched behavioral economics of waste management, and has also developed a sustainable supply chain calculator for a Fortune 500 corporation. She is currently conducting her master's thesis research on toxins used in the apparel industry, and how they negatively affect both female reproductive well-being and newborn development. She is creating a campaign and consumer product that educates females about these associated health concerns in the hopes of reducing exposure to toxic risk factors.
Lourdes Martinez is a Service Designer who recently graduated from Parsons Strategic Design and Management masters program. There, she focused more than eighteen months researching the textile industry systems, how they work and how they can improve. After spending some time working in an AI startup in Brooklyn, she decided to move back to her home, Peru, and continue her role as a Social Entrepreneur . Now, she works as a consultant with different communities and she has co-founded the Net Impact Peru professional chapter. Her previous experience in textile research and textile upcycle pop-up events (co-created with NYC Textile Lab), as well as her know-how of innovative methodologies will be the perfect combination to create the Wear it Wise campaign.
Contact Net Impact at [email protected]
Marissa Piancone is an undergraduate student at Fordham University majoring in Applied Accounting and Finance with a concentration in Social Innovation. She hopes to pursue a career that involves social and sustainable business initiatives with an emphasis on the triple bottom line framework, transparency, and reversing consumerism. Through her work with Spes Nova, a fair trade nonprofit organization selling goods made by artisans in developing countries, the Fashion Sustainability Practicum as part of Fordham's Social Innovation Collaboratory, and the Students for Fair Trade club, she has developed a fascination with the impact of sustainable fashion and how businesses can embrace it. Her most significant endeavors currently include launching fair trade pop-up shops through Spes Nova as well as promoting a sustainable fashion curriculum that she created at Fordham, which will both be facets of the Wear it Wise campaign.
Melissa Kaslowski graduated from Columbia University’s Master’s program in Sustainability Management. She met Megha Kedia during her Master’s program through collaborating on many projects together and decided to further their teamwork to improve the fashion industry. Melissa will be leading the campaign with support from Megha. While Megha has an engineering background and Melissa has a social studies background, both share the same passion for waste management. After attending the Net Impact Conference in Atlanta, Melissa wanted to focus on applying the principles of the circular economy to the apparel sector and to focus on reducing waste by altering consumer behavior. Melissa and Megha enjoy the concept of advising to make sustainable choices and look forward to educating the community about sustainable fashion.
Ndi Kilian Ngwang is a holder of a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry with a professional Diploma in Management and many years working with humanitarian organizations. He focused on poverty alleviation in his community and in 2016, came up with a project to alleviate poverty through youth empowerment in tailoring and fashion designing, a project sponsored by the Pollination Project. Through this project, the team set up a Tailoring and Fashion Designing Centre where they trained underserved youth who could not afford formal education. Being a Net Impact Chapter leader with experience in hosting events involving climate change issues, it became a concern for Kilian to implement climate change solutions resulting from fashion design. Kilian aims to collaborate with a community council and organize workshops with other Fashion Designers in his community, focusing on the importance of reducing climate change by minimizing industry waste.
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Nicole Hall-Elser is an undergraduate student studying Social Entrepreneurship and Business at Rollins College while working as the Event Coordinator for a local non-profit. She has experience working with sustainable fashion companies and has researched applicable certifications for ethical practices and sustainability within the industry. As an entrepreneur, Nicole has a begun a socially responsible start-up with her classmates. Nicole’s passion for sustainability has shown through in her personal projects and community involvement. She is working in tandem with the Marketing for Social Entrepreneurship class to kick off an online campaign to support the Rethinking Fashion Show. In the show’s third year, the Rollins Net Impact Undergraduate team is excited to integrate a successful Wear it Wise campaign to enhance their program.
Samantha Kirsch is a senior majoring in Fiber Science & Apparel Design Management at Cornell University with minors in Business and Environmental and Sustainability Sciences. Her passion is sustainable and socially responsible fashion and she has traveled to China and India in the past year to look at the apparel supply chain. She is fascinated with the many challenges facing the fashion industry and is ready to disrupt the industry from the inside out. Samantha has worked for the mission-driven brand My Social Canvas since 2014 and was a Summer Associate at DoneGood, a tech start-up that empowers consumers to shop from brands that match their values. On campus, Sam is known for leading the sustainable fashion conversation and looks forward to designing for ECOuture, an environmental fashion show, her main Wear it Wise campaign event.
Timi Komonibo is the founder and Chief Philanthropist of Style Lottery, a startup with the aim to "Restyle, Reuse, and Reward" (TM) with fashion. She is a firm advocate for connecting people to their community and fashion to sustainability. Through her startup, Timi has given a TEDx talk called “How I Found My Heart in a Walk-In Closet.” She was awarded Syracuse University’s “Orange Circle Award” for philanthropy in 2015 and the “Bustle Upstart Award” in 2017. In her spare time, Timi writes about sustainability, fashion, and life on her YouTube channel "Naturale Chronicles.” Her Wear It Wise campaign will use work in tandem with a student-run advertising agency to create a social media campaign to demystify and promote community-wide awareness of sustainability solutions around fashion.
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Tina Jeffress is an MBA candidate at UNC Kenan-Flagler, focusing on energy and sustainable enterprise. She's passionate about the role corporations play in furthering human rights and environmental sustainability, particularly in the fashion and energy industries. Prior to business school, she researched the role of the private sector in international development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C. Her research focused on Latin America and many of the global issues that affect complex apparel supply chains. Prior to CSIS, she directed education and community development programs for Yspaniola, an NGO in the Dominican Republic. She is originally from Redondo Beach, CA and earned a B.A. in International Development from UCLA.
Xavier Ambe graduated from the University of Buea, Cameroon with a Bachelor’s in Educational Psychology and a minor in Sociology and Anthropology. He has a keen interest in developing responsible community hygiene and sanitation habits through hygiene education and capacity building workshops. In his spare time, he attends local fashion events and workshops and currently works with fashion designers to promote sustainable clothing habits among consumers. His particular passion is to use his knowledge in community mobilization and persuasion to develop a mindset shift and preference for home fashion designs and clothing and uncover the negative effects that low quality fashion goods have on the environment in terms of contributing to waste and climate.
Contact Net Impact at [email protected]