Two young women from Boston adtech company Visible Measures want to get their female peers talking about the future of innovation.
Armed with passions for activism and business, Katrina Melesciuc and Tara Chang started blogging in July about women leadership, entrepreneurship and personal development. Now, after a month of positive feedback and enthusiasm, the enterprising duo have decided to open up their site, called Women’s iLab, to the public.
“We spun out initially by just building a blog and branding ourselves,” Chang told BostInno. “We want it to be a platform for women, where anyone can contribute and talk about their passions and personal interests. … The question was, ‘How do we get young women to strengthen their voice in the market and share their perspectives?’”
Though currently based out of Visible Measures’ New York City office, Chang is an alum of MIT’s Media Lab and Sloan School of Management. She and Melesciuc, who earned her MBA at Northeastern, first met when they were working in Visible Measures’ Downtown Boston location.
‘How do we get young women to strengthen their voice in the market and share their perspectives?'
They also both tout Boston’s startup ecosystem as one of the muses of Women’s iLab.
Many young companies within the Hub’s tech scene have women executives – but there’s always room for more. With WiLab, Chang and Melesciuc hope to highlight established female founders, innovators and creatives in Boston and other international communities – and inspire rising stars in the process.
Local leading women from Rue La La, The Metropolitans, Hill Holliday, The City of Boston, Startup Institute, MiniLuxe, Roomzilla, and other national companies, such as Rent The Runway, Facebook, Warby Parker, Porsche and LinkedIn, will likely contribute content to WiLab or be spotlighted in stories at some point over the next few months, according to Chang and Melesciuc.
The content on WiLab will cover all sorts of “Spheres of Innovation,” from cooking and fashion to philanthropy and awareness to finance and startups. “We want it to become a one-stop resource for any girl in the working world to empower herself and inspire more ideas,” explained Melesciuc.
But that’s not all. WiLab aims to let young, working women from around the globe use the platform to seek out new areas of interest and build their personal brands. In that sense, WiLab is a little bit Thought Catalogue-meets-LinkedIn for women. WiLab will be featuring stories from contributors who hail from Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Istanbul, Vietnam, London and Colombia coming up in the next month, according to Melesciuc.
All content on WiLab is curated by the site’s team, but the site’s founders promise contributing is easy. While Melesciuc and Chang are still working at Visible Measures, there’s potential for the digital property to spin out as more than a side project.
For now, though, the platform’s still in its early stages, and Melesciuc and Chang are focused on drumming up WiLab's content by building a rich contributor community.
Said Chang, “We want people to go on and write whatever they want, and take in the content as a way to explore and be exposed to new things.”
Image courtesy of Women's iLab
