Karen Kenworthy, Partner at Stripes Group.Brian Krumrei, Angel Investor & Advisor.Anna Ohlsson-Baskerville, Director of Unilever Ventures.Kevin Murphy, Managing Director of Encore Consumer Capital.Arif Fazal, Founder and Managing Director of Blueberry Ventures.Jed Wang, Head of strategic Initiatives of Amazon Launchpad.Josh Goldin, Co-Founder of Alliance Consumer Growth.Elly Truesdall, Global Product Innovation & Development, Whole Foods.Deb Hannah, Director of Retail Brand Partnerships at Starbucks.Janica Lane, Managing Director, Piper Jaffray.Nick Giannuzzi, Founder and Partner of Giannuzzi & Co.Gigi Lee Chang, Founder of Plum Organics and Managing Director of FoodFutureCo.Brian Tockman, Principal at General Mills 301 INC.Brad Barnhorn, Board Member to Growth Stage Food and Beverage Companies.Kirsten Green, Partner at Forerunner Ventures.John Foraker, Founder and President of Annie’s Organics.Alexia Bonatsos, Former Editor-In-Chief of TechCrunch.Wayne Wu, Managing Director at VMG Partners.A big thank you to our judges for their time and effort. Once Helio narrowed down the nominees, we arrived at a list of finalists for our judges to vote on.

We also used Helio to surface new candidates, querying it to find fast-growth companies scoring well across brand, team, distribution, product quality and financial performance, to make sure we didn’t miss any strong contenders in the call for submissions. For each company, Helio draws on thousands of measurements, for analyses that represent over a billion data points. We’re excited to see 48% of the winning brands with all women-led founding teams, and 60% of winners with women co-founders and/or current CEOs.Īfter opening the call for submissions, we ran the 1,000+ nominees through Helio, our internal data science platform that analyzes 1.2 million consumer businesses to predict future business success, to surface the top performing brands as finalists. Women-led innovation: The consumer industry has long benefited from the leadership of inspiring women, and the 2017 winners reflect their impact.Boutique fitness continues to be massively popular with consumers, but this year didn’t show a single new breakout star within the category. A flatline in boutique fitness: In years past, we’ve always had a standout boutique fitness brand, like SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp or Tough Mudder.Nearly 30% of the 2017 winners are in personal care and beauty. For decades, personal care and beauty targeted either a very mature or very young audience, but today, there are a host of brands catering perfectly to millennials with unique products and online marketing and distribution. A boom in personal care: Last year was all about a boom in functional beverages, a category still seeing very healthy growth, but personal care and beauty are now center-stage in the innovation spotlight.

Stripes group karen kenworthy