Hello, I am Sydney Williams, a senior at LREI, and for my project I plan on starting the process of forming a skincare company through creating a viable business plan and a working product prototype. In addition to this, I will also be interning for Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), a non-profit organization dedicated towards teaching entrepreneurial skills to students in low income communities. 

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by skincare. The ingredients, the ritualistic aspect of it, and the science behind how it works have been a source of both wonder and passion for me, a passion that has been expressed through my own attempts at making products and the desire to start my own company. I started to experiment with various formulas at around the age of eight, mixing various oils and plant glycerides in order to create hair and facial products. As I got older, these formulas started to gain in complexity until I decided to do an honors project based on my passion in the eleventh grade. My honors project, mentored by Kara Luce, was titled “The Science of Skincare”. My mission for this project was to study the effects of skincare ingredients on the epidermis through experimentation. For my experiment, I created four different versions of the same product with varying ratios of ingredients and tested their ability to hold moisture on multiple agar plates. While this honors project provided me with a wonderful opportunity to learn more about my passion through a scientific lens, I still needed to understand it through a business perspective. Over the summer of 2022, I attended an all-womens entrepreneurship bootcamp called BossGirls, created by the Zahn Innovation Center in partnership with Standard Chartered Bank. I was taught entrepreneurial skills such as how to make resumes, build a customer database, and prepare business plans. I was also given the opportunity to put what I’ve learned into practice. Every student within the program was split into groups of two to five people and tasked with creating a business, product, or service that tackled one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): societal, infrastructural, and environmental areas in need of improvement in order to ensure a sustainable future. After graduating from this program, I not only left with a deeper understanding of how business ideas are formulated and made into a reality, but I was faced with a new lens through which to look at my dream: how can I make my business sustainable and environmentally friendly in an ever changing world? 

My senior project combines everything I’ve learned from my summer program, my honors project, and the knowledge I’ve accumulated about skincare over the years. My goal for this project is to create a viable business plan for a sustainable skincare company, complete with everything from target consumers and revenue models to shipping logistics made in order to achieve carbon neutrality. In addition to this, I also plan on creating a functioning model for one of my products. I aim for this model to have either biodegradable and/or reusable packaging as well as a finished formula. How successful my project will be can be determined by the completeness of my business plan, the functionality of my product prototype, and how closely my project adheres to my goal of creating a carbon neutral company. 

In conclusion, preparing a business plan will not only jumpstart the creation of a possible career but help me to develop an entrepreneurial mindset towards tackling global issues.