A hair care line, a company using recycled glass to replace lost coastal areas and a business that makes it easier to train employees are facing off against each other at theNew Orleans Entrepreneur Week pitch competition.
This year's event, which has been restyled "NOEW Fest," starts on Monday and continues through April 1, with the addition of a closing "fun day" of food and music at The Broadside in Mid-City. While most of the educational events will remain free.some of the fest events that take place through the week now require tickets, including the March 31 pitch final at Generations Hall in the Warehouse District.
Sydni Raymond will be there making the investment case for Bomb Ass Fro, the company she founded two year ago, inspired by her own quest for a way to deal with the bad hair days she has struggled through in the oppressive humidity of her native New Orleans.
Raymond, a Xavier University graduate, was fed up with having to buy so many products and decided she needed to create her own all-in-one solution. She recruited a chemist and together they began experimenting. In early 2021, Bomb Ass Fro was born.
If we win, the first thing I will do is get my inventory back up, said Raymond, who manufactures in Tampa and fulfills online orders from a local warehouse facility. I also plan to hire employees and expand my product line. Eventually, wed like to get into salons and retail outlets like Whole Foods.
Her competitors include Glass Half Full, a company founded in 2020 by then-Tulane University students Franziska Trautmann and Max Steitz who were looking for ways to make glass recycling both useful and profitable.
"We're innovating in a traditional space (and) our business model is to have revenue at both the front end and the back end," Trautmann said.
Glass Half Full has a roster of residential and business clients who pay them to pick up glass and take it to their facility in the Desire area, where it is crushed into sand and gravel. The results are used in coastal restoration projects, or sold to landscapers, jewelry-makers and flooring manufacturers.
The company has done three coastal restoration projects so far: one on land owned by the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe; one at the Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge on the north shore; and another at the Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle.
Glass Half Full has gotten by so far on grants and "free money" from GoFundMe campaigns. Trautmann said a win would give them money to expand their pick-up program to Mississippi and eventually to open hubs in other Gulf states.
David Decuir said his company, iCan, came about while he was working for Danos. The Terrebonne Parish energy company wanted Decuir to run training and figure out a way to get employees new skills and monitor their progress. He started to use cloud services to put together comprehensive programs that make it easier to plot how employees are acquiring the skills they need for specific jobs.
Not only have the current owners of Danos invested in iCan, but that led them to start Danos Ventures and start backing other start-ups.
This year's winners will not be holding up big prize money checks, as in previous years, according to Jon Atkinson, CEO of the Idea Village, which produces NOEW. The checks have always been a bit misleading, as it is an "investment prize" that comes with strings attached: the winners have to meet certain investment goals and then the prize money is invested.
Last year's exceptionally large prize fund of $750,000 was made possible because of the largesse from companies like Levelset and Lucid, local startups that had been sold the previous year.
This year, the winners won't immediately know how much they will get as Idea Village is still finalizing a new investment platform that it hopes will provide a more predictable and sustainable source of prize money that can be spread more widely.
"NOEW 2022 was a special moment for IDEApitch," said Atkinson. The prize money pot was the largest of any start-up pitch competition in the country.
While this year's competition won't have big checks on stage, the Idea Village is working on implementing a more expansive funding strategy, with the support of last year's investors and the state's new State Small Business Credit Initiative program, Atkinson said.
He has promised competitors the prize money will be "comparable" to last year's.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated to clarify that admittance to Ideapitch will no longer be free.
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"Bomb Ass Fro" up against glass recycling and skills software for this year's pitch prize - NOLA.com