Alexandra Merlino has always been an avid outdoorswoman, often hiking in the mountains around Santa Fe and other parts of New Mexico, or playing tennis.
While Merlino would often wear sunscreen while active outside, a skin cancer diagnosis, she said, made the need to apply sunscreen more "urgent."
But when hunting for the right sunscreen product, Merlino said she couldn't find something smaller and readily available for reapplication, and sustainably made — no options on the market met both standards.
So, with some previous entrepreneurship experience and a personal story, Merlino came up with the idea for Bee Wild Outside, a "conscious" skin care company developing a refillable, non-toxic mineral sunscreen product in a compact, on-the-go dispenser.
Merlino launched Bee Wild Outside in late 2023. But as someone who's spent a lot of time outside New Mexico in recent years, she sought an entrepreneurial community in the state for support and connection.
That community came in the form of an entrepreneurship accelerator program run by the Center for Responsible Entrepreneurship within the University of New Mexico's Anderson School of Management.
The program enrolled 14 entrepreneurs, including Merlino, for its inaugural socially conscious business cohort, most of which hailed from Northern New Mexico.
She said she first became interested in the program through a connection with Jon Mertz, Ph.D., who she met a few years ago with Santa Fe Innovates, a business accelerator in the City Different.
Mertz is one of the program's leaders. The 10-month accelerator culminated in a pitch event at the Santa Fe Higher Education Center on June 6.
Merlino was among 12 of the program's entrepreneurs to pitch on June 6 and one of three to receive the "most compelling pitch" recognition from a panel of three judges. The recognition came with $2,500 toward each entrepreneur's business, from UNM's Anderson School of Management.
The three judges included Bridget Dixson, president and CEO of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce; Ward Hendon, general partner with Santa Fe-based venture firm Dangerous Ventures; and Drew Tulchin, the president of the New Mexico Angels.
Alongside Merlino, Rachel Lee and Eric Maria also received most compelling pitch recognition. Lee's business, called Artisans of Nations, provides marketing and storytelling for Native-made contemporary arts, and Maria's business, Princes' Pies, is an Indigenous food truck serving the Navajo Nation.
Each of the entrepreneurs in the program participated in business sessions focused on areas like customer discovery, different markets and how to manage conflict between profit and purpose; the book "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" by Bill Aulet guided the sessions, Mertz said.
Local founders, including Fran Maier, the founder and CEO of Santa Fe-based BabyQuip, and Justin Crowe, founder and CEO of Parting Stone, also based in Santa Fe, spoke to program participants, too, about their own entrepreneurship stories.
For Merlino, learning more about how to approach customer discovery, and hearing from established businesspeople about the importance of patience in business building, were two major takeaways from the 10-month program. She said her business, Bee Wild Outside, is currently finalizing a prototype of its refillable sunscreen product, with the goal of starting manufacturing by the end of this summer and taking the product to market in the fourth quarter of this year.
She said the entrepreneurs in the cohort have become "quite close," scheduling time to meet outside of the program's monthly sessions and practice pitching their businesses to one another. Those relationships will continue now that the program is finished, Merlino added.
Mertz said UNM's Center for Responsible Entrepreneurship plans to open applications for its second business accelerator program in July. It would start the second 10-month program toward the end of August after reviewing applications, wrapping it up in late May 2025.
The program's first cohort, he said, "really set the standard" for the work required under the program. The Center intends to continue working with those entrepreneurs from its first cohort in a one-on-one capacity and hold quarterly events to bring together members of the first cohort and the yet-to-be-selected second cohort.
He said the Center wants to include more "deliverables" in the second iteration of the program, something he said he heard from the entrepreneurs in the first cohort — "give us a little more accountability for doing the work."
