Beth Esponnette

 

In true entrepreneurial fashion, Beth is at her best when she’s experimenting and discovering new things. She grew up in the backwoods of Maine, where she was daily inspired by the natural world’s perfect manufacturing and circular lifecycles. This motivated her to consider new solutions for the fashion industry using on-demand and additive manufacturing. She founded unspun in 2015, bringing in a great team to help build an inclusive, sustainable industry through custom-fit, on-demand manufacturing (read: body scan jeans made with 3D weaving robotics), which has been recognized as a Best Invention by TIME (twice), Best of What’s New winner by Popular Science, World Changing Idea by Fast Company, Marie Claire’s Best sustainable jeans brand; award, and as a Global Change Award winner by H&M. Beth has also been named on the Forbes NEXT 1000 list.

“My value set circles around protecting our home planet and working toward equity and equality, especially for people. The strongest thing I believe I can do for the women in my life is to inject energy and to be a cheerleader,” says Beth. “Women are by default always feeling imposter syndrome no matter how confident they are. It is effectively impossible to not have imposter syndrome as a woman in most professional settings just by virtue of our sex and how we identify ... I view it as my role to remind women of their power.”

Before unspun, Beth developed products and materials in the outdoor gear and apparel industry, instructed at a machine shop, helped design robot-human soft good interfaces, and taught product design at the University of Oregon. She serves as an SBIR proposal reviewer for the US National Science Foundation and received both a BS in Fiber Science & Apparel Design from Cornell and an MFA in Design from Stanford. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two kids.

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