Stronger: work it, make it, so it, makes us, harder, better, faster, stronger, now that, that don’t kill me, can only make me stronger.
Kanye knows it, Dolly knows it, even Kenny Rogers knows it. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but how do we keep going when the going gets tough? How do we meet the challenge of business in today’s climate? How do you make the right decisions, building ethical businesses that have impact, all while managing to muster staying power when you’ve been knocked down, and down again.
This inspiring start-up and scale-up business event is the very first event for Launchpad in Australia. After launching in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Bali – the powerful network of Launchpad is coming to Australia to support ethical, impact startups – and you are invited.
If you are looking for an evening of 100% pure connected goodness with epic humans building impact startups and scaleups, do not miss this event (tickets are very limited!)
Hosted by Australian Co-Founders Odette Barry (Founder of Hack Your Own PR) and Chris Edwards ( Founder of Honeycombers) this event includes a cocktail, canapes and a powerful panel discussion with trailblazers: Kirstin Hunter, Managing Director at Techstars, co-Founder and former CEO at Future Super, Rachael Wilde, Co-Founder & CMO at tbh Skincare, and Anaita Sarkar, Co-Founder and CEO of Hero Packaging and Author of Sell Anything Online.
About the panellists
Anaita Sarkar
Co-Founder and CEO of Hero Packaging and Author of Sell Anything Online
Anaita is the co-founder of Hero Packaging, Founder of Olivia&Co. (exited), Author of Sell Anything Online, Guest Lecturer at Macquarie University, wife and mother of 3 daughters.
From their dining table, Anaita and her husband co-founded Hero Packaging, an online home-compostable packaging company. What started as a solution for her previous business, where she was using enormous amounts of plastic to ship her products, is now a global company that has sold over 20 million compostable mailers to businesses. Hero Packaging continues to grow very fast and now has over 40,000 customers. The focus, for Anaita, has always been to make packaging fun again, whilst doing better for the planet.
Before starting her businesses, Anaita tried her hand at Accounting, Media and Marketing. When she fell pregnant with her second daughter, she knew it was time to ditch the cubicle and start something of her own. Her first business grew steadily and she was able to sell it in 2020 just before giving birth to her third daughter.
During 2020, while running Hero Packaging and being pregnant, Anaita wrote a Digital Marketing book called Sell Anything Online. The goal of the book is to help e-commerce business owners take actionable steps every day to grow their business. To sell the book, Anaita joined TikTok and started to create marketing videos. Within 12 months, she has grown that to 280,000 followers. From that, Sell Anything Online became a business in itself with Anaita offering one on one mentorship calls, ads services, website audits and SEO audits.
Anaita is passionate about entrepreneurship and business and loves to talk to business owners everyday and help them grow using a marketing formula she created to scale her businesses. She has been featured in Entrepreneur.com, Smart Business, Channel 7’s Sunrise and Mamamia’s Lady Startups.
Kirstin Hunter
Managing Director (NSW) at Techstars
Kirstin is the Managing Director (NSW) at Techstars – the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed. In this role Kirstin uses her unique combination of entrepreneurial, strategic, operational and legal skills to select the most promising startup founders to participate in Techstars’ 13-week mentor-driven accelerator operating from TechCentral in Sydney.
Kirstin is an experienced start-up and high-growth business executive with a particular focus on fintech businesses at the intersection of activism and capitalism: co-Founder and former CEO at Future Super, former executive at Brighte, and long-time mentor with Blackbird’s Giants program and Startmate fellowships. In her spare time Kirstin is on the board of Morphic Ethical Equities (ASX:MEC), the chairperson at Ocean Impact Organisation and parent to 8 year old Elizabeth.
Kirstin is also a reformed lawyer (Freehills) and reformed management consultant (Bain & Co), where she spent 10 years advising some of the largest companies and charities in Australia and Canada. Her expertise includes technology-driven transformation, organisational design, due diligence and productivity improvement in financial services, telecommunications and private equity. She has been a serial entrepreneur within these professional services firms, driving new internal policies, programs and charitable partnerships.
Kirstin is a sought-after mentor, facilitator and panellist, specialising in topics of purpose in business, ethical investing, superannuation, strategic planning, women and leadership, confidence, flexible working, and gender parity.
Rachael Wilde
Co-founder of tbh skincare; Co-founder & CMO of York St Brands
Rachael Wilde is the Co-Founder & CMO at tbh Skincare. tbh Skincare set out on a mission to understand, empathise with, and solve their customers’ problems. And whilst the treatment of acne may appear to be a clinical problem to solve, co-founder Rachael understood that the challenges surrounding acne went way below the surface of her customer’s skin.
tbh’s mission is a deeply personal one to Rachael, having suffered her own 13 year long battle with acne. Rachael describes tbh as being the ultimate confidant for the breakout prone customer, where tbh ensures scientifically backed formulas translate into products that fulfil the core needs and wants of their customer group.
About the hosts
Odette Barry
Founder, Odette & Co; Co-Founder, Launchpad Australia
Odette Barry is a storyteller who loves nothing more than helping businesses share their stories through traditional media. She is a publicist, PR mentor and founder of Odette & Co – a micro PR agency based out of Byron Bay.
Her career spans marketing and communications for Westpac, the Australian Physiotherapy Association, TAFE NSW and Women’s Fitness magazine – so she’s worked all sides of the communications domain.
Since establishing the consultancy arm of Odette & Co, she has worked with small and enterprise businesses across Australia and New Zealand spanning the technology, design, education, beauty, wellness, health and fashion sectors (to name just a few). This diverse portfolio of experience means she has a broad range of experience to support just about any communications challenge.
Odette is committed to helping her clients secure genuine and valuable coverage, and she does that with an intimate knowledge of the media landscape and trusted relationships with media outlets.
Odette is a headline-winning PR mentor, who designed and teaches the popular Hack Your Own PR program, an intimate program designed for small business owners because she knows that every business has a story to tell.
And if you’re looking to upskill and learn a little about the media industry and how to score your own headlines, look no further than Odette’s podcast where she interviews some of Australia’s best journalists, producers, editors and hosts about the commonly misunderstood publicity gig.
Chris Edwards
Founder, Honeycombers; Co-Founder, Launchpad Australia
Chris is a serial entrepreneur having started her first business in 2008 at 28 years of age — a lifestyle media platform: Honeycombers. Honeycombers is now the go-to lifestyle resource for locals, expats and tourists alike across Singapore, Hong Kong and Bali. She has also created a parenting platform called HoneyKids Asia. Collectively there are over 1 million unique readers of Honeycombers content across South East Asia every month.
Chris started coaching entrepreneurs, and from this experience she saw the need for a community for conscious entrepreneurs, so she created Launchpad in 2022. Launchpad is an entrepreneurial community, designed to help small businesses thrive through community, peer mentoring and coaching. Launchpad today has over 450 members from across 6 countries.
Chris now runs 4 companies across 4 countries and hosts a weekly podcast called Good Business where she interviews impact-led founders. Chris spends her time split between Singapore, Hong Kong, Bali and Byron Bay, Australia, where she lives with her husband and three kids.