Queen of Raw Tackles Textile's Achilles Heel

A corporate attorney turned fashion tech and sustainability entrepreneur, Stephanie Benedetto is a Techstars graduate and recently launched her flagship product Materia MX, a marketplace to quickly and easily sell unused fabrics online - because today more than $120 billion worth of excess fabric sits in warehouses, your home and end up in the in the waste stream.

Why you should care

But the big story is in the economic impact of textile production. The textile industry is second only to agriculture as the biggest polluter of clean water globally. The dyeing, rinsing, and treatment of textiles release toxic chemicals into our water supply that cannot be filtered or removed. Think of your favorite cotton T-shirt. It requires 700 gallons of water and ⅓ of a pound of chemicals to produce. That’s enough water for one person to drink for three years. And that’s just one shirt — more than 2 billion shirts are sold worldwide each year. If we continue at the current pace, two-thirds of the entire world’s population will face shortages of freshwater and be exposed to these hazardous chemicals by 2025.

Materia MX

With Materia MX, Stephanie and her team developed a Next gen supply chain software that connects tier 1, tier 2, & tier 3 suppliers, repairs holes in the chain, and intelligently prevents future waste. They have created blockchain-enabled marketplace that brings raw material back to life by giving the factories that over produce it and the apparel brands with excess inventory a place to recapture its value and map, measure, and trace supply chains. Their vision is to build the number one platform for sustainable sourcing across all industries using textile.

Law, Fashion and Passion

Prior to starting Queen of Raw, Stephanie worked as a lawyer in the fashion, media/entertainment, start-up, and technology industries and co-founded a sustainable textile manufacturing facility. An advocate for women in business and sustainability, her companies have been featured in NYTimes, Vogue, WWD, ELLE, Cheddar, Parade, WCBS, United Nations, Fortune, Entrepreneur, WIRED, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Fast Company.

Stephanie is a NASA/NIKE/IKEA/DELL LAUNCH.org Innovator, a Grand Prize WeWork Creator Awards Winner presented by Ashton Kutcher, was nominated as a Founder to Watch by Women 2.0, and was a Finalist for the WGSN Global Fashion Awards, Rent the Runway/UBS Project Entrepreneur, and the $1M Verizon Powerful Answers Award. She is a Member of Pledge 1% and Founding Member of Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network, along with Aveda, Kering, and Stella McCartney.