In my summer at Infinite Goods, I built the organization's in-house clothing circularity program from scratch and established a process for sourcing sustainable brands and designers to bring onto the marketplace.

I launched the \"Infinite Loop Program,\" a program where customers order a bag to recycle old clothes and in turn receive a discount to shop sustainable clothing on the Infinite Goods marketplace. Infinite Goods partners with Sortile, another startup founded by Columbia Business School alumni, to sort through the clothing sent in and process it for upcycling or recycling. Over the summer, the team promoted this new program by leveraging our personal networks, organic site traffic, and Infinite Goods'first in-person pop-up! This resulted in the acquisition of new unique customers for Infinite Goods and the foundation for Infinite Goods to further its circularity goals.

Additionally, I built an \"Infinite Loop Brand Partner Log\" to support the sourcing and outreach to brand partners who fit Infinite Goods' sustainability criteria. In just a few months, our team developed a robust backlog of potential brand partners by searching through hundreds of potential brands and began to determine our outreach strategy for each.

These programs address issues facing both consumers and producers in the fashion industry, advance Infinite Good's mission to transform the fashion industry and make it more beneficial for both our planet and its people.

I heavily leaned on new tools Professor Daniel Wolfenzon and Professor Dan Wang covered across Corporate Finance and Strategy, respectively, in Columbia Business School's MBA core. To understand the impact of the Infinite Loop program, I created a financial model that helped us evaluate short-term results and long-term scalability of the program. The model served as a framework to consider all costs and potential revenue of the program. These two courses, along with others like Accounting for Consultants with Professor Tim Baldenius and High Performing Nonprofits with Professor Amy Houston, provided me with new vocabulary and processes to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the success of an organization's programs over time, which built on my past career experiences. Notably, I designed the initial financial model in a way that makes it easy for the Infinite Goods team to adapt and update as the program evolves.

The greatest challenge was building a logistically intensive program from scratch. Aileen Lee, founder, of Infinite Goods, had an idea to connect consumers back to producers in the fashion industry, which has traditionally seen products pushed one way — from producers to consumers. To establish Infinite Goods as a truly circular marketplace, we needed a way to recollect textiles from customers which we could offer back to producers or to sustainable recyclers.

My first step was to spend some time more deeply understanding what existing companies and organizations were doing to further minimize the 85 percent of our closets that end up in landfills. I identified strategies that seemed to be working well and strategies that were failing to move the needle. As a team, we settled on a mix of strategies to execute. Moving from the research to the execution phase can sometimes be the hardest. But I was encouraged to just “rip it,” as Dana Lerner, Infinite Goods' marketing leader and another Tamer Center for Social Enterprise Fellow, would say throughout the summer.

With more digging, I figured out ways to ship Infinite Loop bags to customers who ordered them online. I also enabled the team to distribute bags at in-person events with the creation of return labels that required several hours on the phone with the United States Postal Service. Turns out there's limited information readily available on how a new business can or should set up a cost-effective shipping program. The development of the Infinite Loop program required me to identify unique and novel solutions to create a program that would drive impact for both Infinite Goods' customers and brand partners who have a keen interest in creating a more sustainable fashion industry.

In joining Infinite Goods, my goal was to create the foundation for a clothing circularity program that would further advance Aileen's vision for Infinite Goods and the fashion industry. I ultimately launched a fully operational clothing recycling program, which required me to deeply leverage both my pre-MBA product marketing experience and my newer strategy operations skills acquired throughout the MBA. While I thought I was trying to move away from my previous career while pursuing my MBA, but I came to realize the incredible value that existed when I leaned into my customer-centric product experience.

This summer, I learned to consider implementing sustainable practices throughout a business. It wasn't enough that the Infinite Loop program was helping people recycle their textiles, but we had to design the program in a way that was environmentally sustainable. Aileen had found bags made from recycled ocean plastic, and I labored over eco-friendly instruction labels. We originally launched the bags with corresponding paper postcards with instructions for the customer, but quickly iterated and moved away from that to reduce our use of paper. Overtime, Infinite Goods has the opportunity to look into carbon offsets for shipping as the program grows beyond our summer pilot.

This summer, I also further developed my capacity to be comfortable launching a minimum viable product (MVP) and iterating on it, rather than waiting for it to be perfect before launching. Aileen is a skilled leader, and gently pushed the team to execute and learn rather than remain deep in the research.