Genia Mineeva, BEEN London
“INVEST IN WOMEN”
“I always had two sides of me - technology, media and impact - and a love for beautiful, slow craftsmanship,” says Genia Mineeva, founder of BEEN London. Working with an East London bagmaker, she creates and sells purses, laptop cases and handbags made from recycled leather, repurposed and processed from off-cuts and trimmings. Zips are made from recycled plastic bottles. Other materials include repurposed cotton, felt and extracted pineapple leaf fibres.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Genia worked as a BBC political journalist and Communications Director for the petition platform change.org. The spark for starting Been was a documentary about waste: “I started researching in both directions: What happens to things when we’re done with them? And where do things come from?” From there, she enrolled on a postgraduate course in Sustainable Value Chains at the University of Cambridge. And later, a course at the London College of Fashion.
“I wanted a product that would start conversations between people,” she says. “I wanted to turn something that people considered waste into something so beautiful, so practical, that it would seamlessly go into people’s lives.” BEEN is that conversation, that product, funded through a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. “It took one day to raise the capital to start it. And we were profitable within a year.”
Genia chose to crowdfund her business rather than raise money through traditional investors. “Raising money as a female founder, I felt that I wasn’t in the strongest position - I don’t know where I got this impression from as I never had a ‘no.’ Maybe I felt like that because I was 39, product-based and female,” she says. “It was a similar feeling to when you have a child and you come back to the office and you pretend like you don’t have a family. I always felt like I had to look extra-professional and look impeccable because I had a baby at home. I had to perform even better than everyone else because I was a mother.”
In the end, her customers became her investors, facilitated by the technology platforms Kickstarter and SEEDRS. “Our investors are majority women,” she says. “I just love women. Kick-ass women is what I want in my life.” BEEN is a Living Wage Employer run by an all-female team, representative of the ripple effect of investing in female founders: believe in one woman, support many more.