In 2009, Harvard Business School grad Sarah Kauss was on a hike in Arizona with her mother when she realized she didn’t much feel like drinking the water that had been baking in the sun in her metal bottle. She suddenly had a vision for the container she wished she’d had, a bottle that was more like a thermos, with a sleek design in a pretty color. Back in New York, while working her day job in commercial real estate development, she found a designer who created a curvy prototype she then had manufactured in China in a pretty ocean blue. Though there were already plenty of re-usable water bottles on the market, Kauss’s, which she dubbed S’well, stood out because of its distinctive design and its capacity to keep liquids cold for 24 hours and hot for 12. Her big break came in 2011 when O, the Oprah Magazine, wanted to include S’well on its O List of great products. But the editors wanted a colorful photo so Kauss, who was still working solo, scrambled to produce six more colors, including seashell pink and rowboat red.
S’well has since boomed, with accounts at Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, J. Crew, Neiman Marcus and Starbucks. Revenue has shot up in the last two years, from just under $10 million in 2013 to $47 million last year. Kauss, 40, employs 40 people in her office in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, and plans to hire 10 more staffers this year. She says when she started out, she thought she could convince customers that re-usable bottles were good for the environment but she’s realized that fashion is what sells. “It’s a lot easier to convince people to buy a well-made product that’s by their favorite designer,” she says, “instead of making them feel bad about how many plastic bottles wound up in the ocean last year.”
Because of its rapid rise, S’well took the number one slot in a new ranking of the fifty fastest-growing women-owned or led companies put together by the Women Presidents’ Organization (WPO), a New York-based group founded in 1997 to offer female entrepreneurs mentoring and support. American Express sponsors the list. WPO hosts roundtable events with professional facilitators who own their own businesses through its 129 chapters in the U.S. and 13 countries overseas, spanning Europe, the Middle East, Australia and Africa. Nineteen hundred members pay dues ranging from $900 to $5,000 a year, depending on their company’s revenue, to attend meetings and an annual conference.
For the last nine years WPO has put out its “50 Fastest” list. There is no fee to be considered for the list, which reaches outside its membership roster for candidates. It sends applications to 25,000 women-owned businesses on a list it’s developed over time. Applicants don’t pay to participate. To qualify, businesses need to have had $50,000 in revenue by 2011 and at least $2 million by 2015. The pool of qualified businesses this year came to 400. Then WPO had a CPA calculate the growth rates.
S’well is new to the list this year, but the second-ranked business, Pinnacle Group, which hit $1.2 billion in revenue last year, up from $201 million in 2013, came in first last year. The Dallas-based company was founded 20 years ago by Nina Vaca, then just 25, whose startup capital was the $300 she put in a business checking account. Her idea: recruit workers for companies growing in the late ‘90s tech boom. Her big break came in 2007, when Electronic Data Systems gave her a $180 million contract to hire tech staffers in 45 states. Pinnacle has since developed software for measuring and evaluating employee performance and for handling payrolls. The company has 1,839 employees.
Third on the list is another newcomer, Orangetheory Fitness, a Fort Lauderdale-based chain of workout franchises that is the brainchild of Ellen Latham, 59, who lost her job running a fitness center at a Miami Beach spa in the late ‘90s. A single mother who has a Master’s in exercise physiology from the University at Buffalo, she tried teaching Pilates first in a spare bedroom and then in a rented studio, but found herself asking how she could “blast fat” off her clients’ pudgy bodies. That led her to develop a 60-minute routine where a fitness coach puts a class of 25-30 people of varying levels through the rounds of rowing machines, treadmills, suspension training bands and free weights. Participants wear heart rate monitors that display their efforts on a screen at the front of the room. The goal: Spend at least 12 minutes of the hour, in one-to-three-minute spurts, working at or above 84% of their usual heart rate, which Latham dubbed the orange zone.
Orangetheory markets the idea that when you put your body through a tough routine, you work up an oxygen debt that keeps you burning calories even after you’re done exercising, for as long as 36 hours. Gym interiors are tangerine and slate grey, with orange-tinted lighting. “Orange is effervescent, it’s energy, it’s dynamic,” says Latham, who runs the business with three partners. Four hundred Orangetheory franchises have opened in 41 states and seven countries including Australia. From $3 million in 2013, revenue jumped to $48 million last year. The company has already sold 456 more licenses, which means at least one Orangetheory Fitness will open each day in 2016.
See below for the list of the 50 fastest-growing women-owned/led businesses and our slideshow above for the top 10.
