1. How did you come up with your business concept? What made you select this type?

In 2015, my husband got sick while on a trip to China. The hotel he was staying in called a doctor because he was having trouble breathing. The doctor told him he had most likely got a respiratory infection from the plane, or it could also have been due to the smoke and air pollution in Shanghai. When asking the doctor what he could do to protect himself in the future, he got told that the only thing that he could do was to wear a mask. My husband replied: “What, one of those white masks that make you look like you are sick?”, to which the doctor responded, “Yep!”.

When my husband arrived home and told me what had happened and that these masks were going to be the new normal for travelers and folks who live in big cities around the world. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and feeling like there had to be something better.

Later that week, I randomly got to daydreaming back to my childhood, growing up in the countryside of Costa Rica. My favorite toys as a child were always these two hand-me-down dolls. I loved those dolls, but their clothes were old and worn, so anytime I could get my hands on fabric scraps, I would try to make them new clothes. Most of the time, there wasn’t enough material for an entire outfit, so I started to make little scarves for them instead.

While thinking back on those scarves, I suddenly came up with an idea: Instead of wearing masks, why couldn’t we build filters into regular clothes? Why couldn’t we have something fashionable that could not only add a special touch to any outfit, but that could also help protect the wearer at the same time? I told my husband about my idea, and he immediately got excited! We immediately got to work researching filtration materials and designing our prototype.

2. While starting your journey, what all challenges did you encounter and how they were overcome?

We started in 2016. At that time only countries in Asia were using particulate filtration to help protect against air pollution so we spent four years educating and people here in the U.S. didn’t understand why you need our gear and or care to support us. One key hurdle to overcome was the need to create a filtration material that was durable enough to be used in apparel and washable for repeated wear. Most mask filters are single-use and lose their effectiveness after being worn. 

Pretty much every one of the filtration manufacturers we approached thought we were crazy, but we knew we were onto something and refused to give up. Finally, after months of searching, we found a very specialized manufacturing group to help us make it happen, together we developed our one of a kind G95 filtration material.

3. Kindly shed some light on your ambitions and ideals.

Our goal is to become the sustainable version of N95, the G in G95 is for “Green” so the big picture for us is to create a new sustainable standard for particulate filtration material.

4. What makes your company unique?

In 2015 we came up with an idea to address a problem we had experienced firsthand — namely air pollution. The idea was to incorporate particulate filtration into apparel. In 2016 we developed our prototype Bioscarf and filed our first patent that covered our new design of embedding washable and reusable filtration material in fabric. That design is the foundation for all G95 gear.

5. Define success and how long did it take you to find the same?

Success is doing what you are passionate about and creating sustainable products that allow people to make a difference.

6. If you had one piece of advice for budding professionals just starting out, what would it be?

If you believe and are passionate about an idea, test it and beat it up as much as you can and if it passes all the tests, then start. Unfortunately, if you have anything worthwhile the majority of people won’t get it or understand it until they see it so you have to make it. No need to make the final version with all the bells and whistles make the first one with just enough for people to see it and enough to start to sell it. Ideally do all of that by yourself and with your own $. Then you will have something that exists, is selling and the only hurdle will be more $ to grow. That’s where you want to get to by yourself.