Wunderkinds

When VaLanDria Smith-Lash debuts Coarse Culture’s new Greater Cincinnati HQ this fall, a happy jar will sit prominently in the space.

The vessel holds all the small victories her business, a sustainable, all-natural skin and hair care line, has notched over the years, scribbled on Post-it notes or fortune cookie-sized scraps of paper.

Entrepreneurship – especially while juggling college classes, and/or the usual life changes that hit in your late teens or early 20s – is hard. Collecting those wins helps keep it all in perspective.

“There’s a lot of ups and downs,” Smith-Lash said. “But if I didn’t pursue this, if I didn’t even try, I would have felt like I lost something. (With the jar) it’s cool to see how far you’ve come.”

Smith-Lash is one of five entrepreneurs who lead this year’s Inno Under 25 class, nominated by university and ecosystem leaders and selected by the Cincy Inno editorial team.

The group is among our most diverse since the program’s launch in 2018 – spanning retail, gaming, venture and tech – all age 25 and under.

Some fun facts: Peachy and Vintage co-founders, Caden Adams and Kayla Braden, are being honored this year as a pair.

We dive into what it might be like to date folkloric cryptid Mothman, thanks to developer and digital artist Nukes de Almeida Nuku-Graves.

And we’re shining a spotlight on one of our youngest honorees to date: 19-year-old Darren Baldwin, who bypassed college – a “college skipout,” as he calls it – to jump headfirst into the startup scene.

All are building on vastly different talents. But all have something in common: They have a passion for making the world a better place. No matter where that journey takes them, their stories start in Cincinnati.  

Darren Baldwin

Co-founder, former CTO, Rezon.ai; engineer at Tembo

The term child prodigy isn’t thrown around lightly. It’s also not a phrase Darren Baldwin seems to shy away from. At 19 years old, he’s already amassed some career-defining titles: co-founder, chief technology officer and senior software engineer.

His long-term goal, he said, is to build the city’s next unicorn startup. He’s bypassed college – after finishing high school early – to dive straight into the entrepreneurship track.

“I have a bunch of ideas, and I don’t need to go to college to figure it out,” he said. “I want to build something and solve a problem.”

Baldwin, as a kid, loved playing with Lego bricks. There was excitement in building something from nothing, he said. In executing an idea. When his friends got sucked into video games like Minecraft, he instead obsessed over the code behind it, rebuilding the game from the ground up.

As with the Lego, the end feeling was the same.

“I was like, ‘Wait, I can tell a computer what to do?’” he said. “It was this realization that it speaks a language, and it learns and I can program something that powerful to do certain things. It just blew up from there.” 

Darren Baldwin

Baldwin, in this short career, has already logged stints at Springboro-based Adyptation, a 2019 Ocean accelerator alum that uses software to track an individual’s health metrics remotely; and Pieces, an Over-the-Rhine started co-launched by Inno Under 25 alum Tsavo Knott.

Now he’s looped in with former Astronomer founder and CEO Ry Walker, as Walker builds out his next company, Tembo. Formerly called CoreDB, Tembo is a commercial open-source company based on the popular database Postgres.

The two have also co-founded Cincinnati Ventures, which, as its name suggests, is a locally based venture startup studio. Cincinnati Ventures works to take different startup ideas and build them out.

Cincinnati Ventures has already spun out more than one potential company, including Rezon, a platform for Explainable AI, or the practice of making artificial intelligence systems more transparent, interpretable and comprehensible to humans.

“It’s very rare to find someone at this stage of his career with the level of confidence he’s got,” Walker said. “I talk about this all the time, how important confidence is in startups, and it’s one of the things a lot of Cincinnati companies miss. They have all the humbleness, but VCs would rather invest in confidence over competence.” 

Caden Adams, Kayla Braden

Co-founders, Peachy and Vintage

Companies and consumers alike seem to be championing a recent array of sustainability efforts  being heralded to the forefront by Gen Z, those born between the late 1990s and early 2010s.

For Northern Kentucky University grads, roommates and best friends Caden Adams and Kayla Braden, the push for greener retail is a major driver behind their business, Peachy and Vintage, a Covington-based sustainable market and clothing store.

The secondhand fashion sector, they said, is poised to surpass the fast-fashion industry by 2025. According to Thredup, an online resale store based in the U.S., the market will double in value by 2030 to an estimated $84 billion.

“Gen Z especially is more cognizant of where their clothing is coming, because the fast-fashion industry is so detrimental to the planet and the workers in the factories making the clothing,” Braden said. “For us, a big thing is taking clothes out of the landfill.”

Caden Adams

Kayla Braden

Adams and Braden initially launched Peachy and Vintage as an online shop on e-commerce platform Depop. Covid had everything on lock down, and they had a lot of downtime between classes.

The online shop grew. Soon Peachy and Vintage was designated as a verified top seller.

“We got a little more serious about it, because we realized how much money we could actually make,” Adams said.

The two segued that virtual success by opening in a 500-square-foot storefront as part of Renaissance Covington’s Pike Street Pop Up. The program offers three- to six-month leases, and Peachy and Vintage remained the entire half-year.

The shop relocated to a 2,500-square-foot space along Madison Avenue in fall 2022.

Sales have quadrupled since the move.

Adams and Braden source their inventory from estate sales, garage sales and “every thrift store in town,” Braden said. “The bins,” short for Goodwill Outlet stores, is another favorite, although one that’s becoming more competitive. Products at the Goodwill stores are sold by the pound.

Adams said they’ll typically spend an entire day combing for items.

Vintage, in technical terms, includes any item 20 years or older, and they’ve developed a keen eye for what sells best.

“Most people are looking for that $200 graphic T-shirt. We pick up things that might need a little bit of work, stuff that might be stained or with buttons missing,” Braden said. “We clean it up and sell it at a way more affordable price point. It’s about making sustainable fashion attainable for everybody.”

Peachy and Vintage is now nearing the halfway mark of its two-year lease. Adams and Braden said they’ve not decided on their next move.

A larger storefront would allow them to invest in a direct-to-garment printer and embroidery machine – allowing them to customize clothes, in turn saving even more items that need small fixes or touches.

No matter what happens, both see Peachy as a forever thing.

“Even if we start other businesses or do other things, this is our baby. This will continue,” Braden said. 

Nukes de Almeida Nuku-Graves

Artist, video game developer and creator of Cryptid Coffeehouse

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to date Mothman – or other cryptid characters like Sasquatch, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster – you’re in luck. Nukes de Almeida Nuku-Graves, a University of Cincinnati student, is ready to roll out the final version of her visual novel/dating simulator, called Cryptid Coffeehouse, this fall.

In the game, the character first meets Artemis (aka Mothman) at a coffee shop in a nondescript  idyllic Midwestern town. As the game progresses, there are more characters to meet and choices to make – like where to go for the next date. At the end, there’s a proclamation of love from Mothman itself (the character is non-binary, Nuku-Graves said, and diversity is a key theme throughout).

“On the surface, the game is just a dating simulator. But if you go a little deeper, it’s about human existence and human relationships and being queer and wanting to be close to somebody,” she said. “For queer kids who spend a lot of time online because they don’t find enough community within their own in-person circles, it’s important – not only seeing themselves in a media, but knowing they can make this media, too.”

Nukes de Almeida Nuku-Graves

Cryptid Coffeehouse is roughly 88,000 words. That’s roughly the length of “1984” by George Orwell. That count will nearly double in the third – and final – build, or version, of the game. Nukes has a 150,000-word visual novel drafted, close to the size of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

Nuku-Graves plans to release that third build in mid-November and expects an uptick in downloads and sales.

To date, Cryptid Coffeehouse has been played by about 16,000 people, generating around $4,000 in sales. It’s posted for free (or as a pay-as-you-can offering) on itch.io, a platform for indie video games, and Steam, a larger online marketplace.

Once Cryptid Coffeehouse is complete, Nuku-Graves looks forward to launching more projects. “I have a whole mental list of games I want to make,” she said. There’s even a possible Cryptid Coffeehouse spinout in the works.

She still wants it to remain accessible.

“The money will come,” she said. “I’m hoping I can do more promotion and stuff, but I’m not too concerned. Making work that’s engaging for people is a huge motivating factor.”

VaLanDria Smith-Lash

Founder, Coarse Culture

VaLanDria Smith-Lash didn’t initially set out to create a new skin care – or self-proclaimed “self-care” – line. But the 22-year-old Miami University alum is now working full time to build out her brand, Coarse Culture, a moisturizing whipped shea butter that can be used by all “from hair to toe.”

The company is an Amazon Prime partner, and Smith-Lash has set a goal to add at least four local brick-and-mortar retailers by the end of 2023. Also on her list? Product placements in stores like Target, Whole Foods and Walmart and an array of mass-production facilities across the U.S.

Big picture, she sees Coarse Culture as the all-natural, plant-based equivalent to Vaseline, one of the world’s most famous brands and a runaway market share leader.

“I see Coarse Culture as a staple product,” she said. “And shea butter is renewable, so it’s healthier for the environment.”

VaLanDria Smith-Lash

Coarse Culture’s origin story dates back eight years to when Smith-Lash was in middle school. Her mother had just been diagnosed with lupus, a long-term autoimmune disorder that wreaked havoc on her ligaments and joints. It also caused skin irritation and hair loss.

Smith-Lash started tagging along to doctors’ appointments and chatting with her mother’s dermatologists. She did her own research on product development and what ingredients might help. In the kitchen she started making her concoctions, using shea butter as the core ingredient.

It worked.

“We started to see a light comeback, not only with her hair being fuller and her skin being softer, but also her confidence,” Smith-Lash said. “The whole idea was for me to put on my cape because moms are superheroes, and they’re always there. It was my turn to give that same love back.”

Smith-Lash formally established Coarse Culture as an official business during Covid in November 2020, securing a manufacturing space in Arlington Heights, Ill.

A feature in Ebony magazine followed in January 2022 – leading to a huge spike in sales.

Things have leveled out since, but Coarse Culture is still on track to quadruple its revenue this year.

In November, the company will officially relocate its HQ from Chicago to a new 1,700-square-foot space in Oxford at College@Elm, a recently completed business incubator located off campus.

Smith-Lash will use it for production and as a mini storefront.

It’s a big step, but the company is firmly planting its flag in the region. Smith-Lash, who graduated in May with a degree in speech pathology and audiology, is opting to bypass graduate school, a more traditional path, to build the business.

She said there are no regrets.

“My thought process was if at 50% – if as a student – I can get into Ebony magazine, I can get us on Amazon, and I can get myself into these accelerator programs and prove to myself, I have the right work ethic, what can we do at 100%? This could eventually be much more impactful.”

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