Greenbook Future List Spotlight: Erin Sowell

Skateboarding: I love skating down hills in particular. I’ll wander around my neighborhood skating from hill to hill to hill. It feels so good… like you’re flying!

Rollerblading: I like to “figure skate” on my rollerblades. It’s fun to listen to music and spin around.

Going to the Movies: My friends and I are regulars at AMC. We love to see thought-provoking movies: dramas, epics, biopics, documentaries, etc.

Gardening: I really love plants. I especially love plants that make food. I decided that I want my 2023 garden to have an unreasonable amount of tomatoes! I also have a thriving strawberry patch. It’s nice to go out between meetings, tend to my garden, and snack on tomatoes and strawberries. I’m very excited to see what this year’s garden brings.

When did you know you wanted to enter a career in insights, and what inspired you?

I found my way to the insights industry through entrepreneuership. When I was a in college, I was a fellow in Lehigh University’s Sustainable Development Lab. During the fellowship, we were given 10 weeks to find a sustainability issue, come up with a market based solution, and build a prototype. My team decided to focus our efforts on the issue of indoor air pollution. Through our research, we found that plants naturally filtered air and thought that this could be an interesting way to draw attention to the issue.

Thus, we set off to develop a plant-based air purifier. Initially, we went through a product discovery phase where the team did research to learn all about the air quality issues, the current solutions, the house plant market, etc. We then created a very rough prototype and did a scrappy experiment to test its effectiveness. After the fellowship concluded, I continued developing the air purifier with a partner. We worked together to turn the very rough prototype into a minimum viable product via an iterative design process which involved even more research. During this phase, our research focused on interior design.

We would go into stores like Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, etc. and ask workers questions to understand what sorts of products sold well and which didn’t, why the store was designed the way it was, how they picked their merchandise, etc. We’d also stop people on campus to hear their thoughts on our designs and prototypes. At the time, I thought I was just being an entrepreneur! I had no idea there was a whole industry that specialized in this work.

Eventually, the air purifier venture reached a point where it was time to go full steam ahead or shut the door. I took some time to think about what I wanted from my career, did a bunch of informational interviews, discovered the insights industry, and went full steam ahead in that direction instead.