S’Well
Five years ago, Sarah Kauss quit her real estate job in hopes of creating a fashionable, yet socially-conscious water-bottle business.
Fast-forward to 2014, and Kauss was listed on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list, and her reusable water bottle company S’well is making $40 million in revenue, Kauss said. The key, she said, was having the belief and passion for doing something nontraditional.
READ MORE: UMD student starts business to sell all-organic, vegan friendly snacks
“Ever since the beginning, we’ve always partnered with a number of charities,” Kauss said to about 50 people at the Department of Women’s Studies’ Gender, Finance and Power talk Wednesday.
Before becoming a successful start-up’s CEO, Kauss studied accounting at the University of Colorado and later went back to school in 2001 to get her master’s of business administration from Harvard. Kauss was deterred by student loan debt and turned to a job in real estate after graduation, she said, building labs all over the world for scientists.
While she had a high position at her job, clients and partners didn’t always see her as in charge because of her gender, Kauss said.
“I overcompensated with educating myself, so I could own the room,” Kauss said. “I didn’t want some engineer coming up to me and telling me something about my building I didn’t already know.”
READ MORE: UMD alumna inspires minority graduate students at diversity forum
While Kauss credited her real estate work with teaching her to lead projects, ask for help and to be confident, she knew that wasn’t what she was meant to do. The idea behind her water bottle product still interested her, and at her Harvard 5-year reunion, Kauss attended a presentation on the clean-water crisis and learned about the dire need for clean drinking water and sanitation around the world.
“I had this moment of epiphany – I had the crazy idea of this better reusable bottle combined with water crisis education,” Kauss said. “It was almost like a message in a bottle.”
Kauss then gained the confidence to quit her job and pursue the idea. Working out of her apartment, she sent one of her first bottles to Oprah, hoping to get the magazine’s stamp of approval.
“I remember a time I only had $2,000 in my bank account,” Kauss said. “That’s not enough to pay rent in New York.”
A senior editor at Oprah responded, and the company took off, she said. Now, S’well works with companies such as Starbucks, Facebook and New York Fashion Week, and is sold at places such as Bloomingdale’s and Crate and Barrel. The company also works in charity with organizations, such as Michelle Obama’s Drink Up, UNICEF and American Forests.
The company is already seeing growth in its newly opened Asia markets, she said. Despite S’well’s several partners and international reach, Kauss said it has no marketing budget.
“Our customers are our foot soldiers,” she said. “We’ve created something ultimately shareable [on social media].”
For freshman finance major Gina Hyun, Kauss’ story was inspiring.
“I want to be an entrepreneur,” Hyun said. “This was a good chance for me to see how a CEO thinks and how they actually started their company.”
Kauss also convinced sophomore supply chain management and operations management and business analytics major Sarina Haryanto to want to go out and buy a S’well bottle.
“She had so much passion,” Haryanto said, adding that she enjoyed hearing about Kauss’ non-linear path to success, and the support she received along the way.
READ MORE: Women unite to inspire female-led teams for Do Good Challenge
Kauss’ emphasized the importance of taking personal risks and leaps of faith to be successful.
“I had to let go of always trying to do things perfectly,” she said. “If I kept [S’well] back until it was ready, it would never have been ready, or someone else would’ve done it first.”
CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, a previous version of the headline incorrectly stated the Center for Women’s Studies sponsored the talk instead of the Department of Women’s Studies. This post has been updated.
