A Handbag for Power-Dressers
A smart-looking handbag can make you look good, but a smart handbag can do much more for you.
The 314, a luxury handbag made in Italy with technology designed at MIT, is both good-looking and smart – and is poised to hit the market soon. The bag can charge your cellphone or any other USB-enabled device, and light up when you are rummaging through its insides. And no, you don’t have to plug in your handbag every night.
Theodora Koullias, 24, is founder and chief executive of Jon Lou, the startup behind the bag. Koullias, who completed her undergraduate degree at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2013, wrote the business plan for her company in her New Enterprises class. Sloan professor Bill Aulet, who co-caught the class, recalls her passion for entrepreneurship and a willingness to learn the soft skills of working in a team. “Often this is hard for undergrads because they’ve been trained to do individual, deterministic tasks well,” he said.
This January, the alum was an invited speaker for the Start6 Program, the institute’s two-week workshop designed to teach its innovators to become entrepreneurs.
So how did Koullias break into luxury fashion?
Read more. html.