Empowering people to seamlessly adopt a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle has always been important to us. Throughout Goli Soda’s seven year journey, we’ve met some incredibly inspiring entrepreneurs who share our dreams for a greener planet. We’ve worked with several small businesses and self-help groups who are changing the world with sustainable solutions for every part of life. The Sustainability Network is a network of truly amazing brands we’ve had the pleasure of working with and a series of conversations with their founders. Our founder, Sruti Harihara Subramanian, will be speaking to them about the journey of their brands, their products, the future of sustainability and more. Tune into our Instagram live streams from 15th June to 19th June, 2020 at 7PM to watch!
Sruti Harihara Subramanian (Founder, Goli Soda) is passionate about being sustainable and is the first consumer of all products sold by Goli Soda. Sruti believes in delivering the highest standards of product satisfaction to the customers with every purchase and believes that education is at the heart of making people change the way they consume. Sruti is a filmmaker of international repute, and she also helps provide guidance, drive support and amplify visibility to a larger audience for the Goli Soda brand.
Sruti was awarded the MOP Vaishnav Award for the Best Entrepreneur and the FICCI FLO Award for Upcoming Entrepreneur both in the year 2019.
Poonam Bir Kasturi is trained as an industrial designer and is passionate about using design for changing systems. Her experience with teaching and working in both the industrial and craft sectors and as a design educator informs her work at the helm of Daily Dump. She is deeply interested in seeing how design can actually engage with what people call messy problems, larger problems. And she likes to focus on creating easy and engaging solutions for conscious city living; to make people aware of the big picture in fresh and simple ways.
As a design-led brand of PBK Waste Solutions Pvt Ltd, Daily Dump is responsible for designing and creating India’s first urban home composter, in 2006.
Bharti Kannan is an engineer by qualification and also holds a master’s degree in social sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Positioned at the confluence of her academic specializations in gender and public health, she founded Boondh in 2016, as a social enterprise that works holistically on menstrual literacy, advocacy, activism, policy and sustainable products.
An engineer-turned-entrepreneur, Swathi Sri Aravind is a new-age mother who believes in driving a change that positively impacts the lives of mothers and babies around – a major reason for her and two others to launch A Toddler Thing in July 2017. After the birth of her nephew, noticing the staggering number of disposable diapers used in an urban house hold, and disturbed by the ill effects on the baby as well as the environment, Swathi delved into some deep research on alternatives, in the process shocked with the fact that Indian mothers and babies had very few options on diapering at low costs, when compared to those all over the world. With a burning need to turn around this scenario, Swathi, along with two other friends decided to go ahead make available the best cloth diapring solutions and mum-baby lifestyle products at reasonable prices.
Today, Swathi is a successful mom-preneur, taking inspiration from mothers and babies around her, as well as her own daughter, with an eagerness to create an environment friendly baby eco-system close to home. With numerous awards to their start-up, Swathi and her co-founders believe that they have but tapped a small portion of the vast potential that they see in delivering this baby-environment safe eco-systems.
Kathy and Jessamijn – both residents of Auroville – co-founded Eco Femme together in 2010 after they met and discovered a common excitement about something very unusual at the time – cloth pads! They both shared a love for the earth and concern for growing use of plastics and decided to direct their passions into attempting to launch and sustain a cloth pad revolution in India – at a time where most women were switching from traditional use of cloth to modern sanitary napkins.
Eco Femme is now in its 10th year and the product has gradually gained a lot of attention both in India and around the world as sustainable menstruation becomes more and more a mainstream choice.
Nisha is the Creative Head of Ariro, and her husband Vasanth Kumar is the Business Head of Ariro. They incorporate Montessori principles in designing simple and purposeful toys. Their toys are made with medicinal woods like neem and ivory. They are handcrafted by rural artisans across India. Ariro began when they started searching for Montessori toys for their daughter who was affected by eczema, with her skin reacting to the plastic found in most toys.
