The email came in at 9:18 am on December 4:
Congratulations! On behalf of Forbes, I’m thrilled to welcome you to the 30 Under 30, Class of 2020.
But when Laura Colagrande (BFA ’13) and her business partner Haley Russell saw the news, they were too exhausted from a late night of work for the moment to sink in.
This list includes innovators like Kevin Systrom, Billie Eilish, Daniel Ek, Kate McKinnon — and now, you.
Colagrande laughs when she recalls how she first read this. To be in the same class of winners as Billie Eilish seemed unreal. She and Russell had carefully planned the trajectory of their company Chippin and courted generous investors who shared a love for their product, but being recognized as outstanding young entrepreneurs—out of nearly 20,000 nominations—was totally unexpected.
The Chippin brand is built on a simple idea: sustainable protein for dog snacks. A pound of the key ingredient, crickets, can be produced with just a single gallon of water. By contrast, popular dog food ingredients like chicken and beef can require hundreds or thousands of gallons to make. Unfortunately, our pets and the food they eat contribute significantly to climate change; Russell and Colagrande think that their product could help reverse that trend.
“The role of businesses is to solve problems,” says Colagrande. It was something she says she learned in her time in the VCUarts Interior Design program. “You can use the design framework to design anything really—a space, a building, a website, a product, a new business model—it’s really more about asking the right question, and then finding solutions that address real [human and customer] needs in ways that are novel and delightful.”
For Chippin, the central question that inspired Russell and Colagrande was, “Can we address a global problem [climate change] with a product?”
“At Chippin we believe in enabling people to make daily sustainable choices that, at scale, have the power to improve the life of pets, people and planet,” says Colagrande.
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