Remarkable local women with local businesses you should know about.
“You can always make something basic better!” Carina declares as she begins to explain how she took one of the most ordinary – albeit always disdained and oft drea...
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What do bras and biotech have in common? Entrepreneur Carina Ramirez Cahan, co-founder of Cobalt Rose Company. Cahan's Cobalt Rose Company is amongst 42% of all businesses in the U.S. that are women-owned. Throughout her storied career, Cahan has taken numerous roads less traveled, especially by women. In this episode, Cahan takes us through the exciting twists and turns of her professional journey, and shares uniquely qualified insights and advice about entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship can be something learned from family or passed down through generations. Or it comes to us as special opportunities to build something new and watch it grow. As a serial entrepreneur, Carina Ramirez Cahan has been building companies over the years to meet different needs. First it was in the area of biofuel and now she is setting her sights on disrupting the bra industry with an innovative wireless option. This New Yorker joins me to talk about what it takes to dig deep, lean on your courage, and keep learning and growing as strategies for success.
In 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal: “If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”
In time, his words were somehow conflated as the oft-cited quote: “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Carina Ramirez Cahan, co-founder of Cobalt Rose Company, is testing Emerson’s thesis, having worked with her husband, a respected breast surgeon, to build a better bra.
The Cobalt Rose bra utilizes a radically new design that replaces rigid underwires — which many women rely on but hate — with a flexible, patented polymer insert that is molded right into the cups.
Carina promises that her bra will be the most comfortable, supportive, and flattering bra her customers have ever worn.
But is that enough? Will that translate into a hefty slice of the annual $12 billion U.S. lingerie market?
As Carina knows firsthand, the path to success is more complicated than it might appear at first blush.
