Brilliantly
The beginnings of Brilliantly were formed in personal loss.
Chalk up Kristen Carbone’s pilgrimage to Fort Worth to the simple philosophy in life that it’s amazing what happens when you just show up.
An investor associate of hers encouraged her to connect with Trey Bowles, executive director of Techstars Fort Worth, the accelerator that focuses on physical health startups. She had a business and product that could benefit from the program, the investor believed.
“This investor was like, you need to talk to this guy, he's gonna know all of the investors in your space,” she says.
So, Carbone made the connection and had an “amazing call,” but, experience being both a blessing and a curse, she couldn’t help but wonder if the call was merely one of checking boxes.
Yeah, we talked to X number of women and X number of minority founders.
Bowles had her fill out an intake form, which, with the same mindset, she did a “half-assed job filling out.” They just want to have proof they spoke to X number of women and X number of minority founders.
Then things turned more serious. She received a call six months later, asking her to pitch to the Techstars screening committee. Yeah, yeah. But, she did so.
“And maybe a week and a half later, they called and offered me a spot. I was so taken aback that I actually burst into tears,” Carbone says. “I ended up talking to my support system here in Providence, Rhode Island, which is quite a far place from Fort Worth, Texas. Everybody was like, ‘No, go!’"
Carbone participated in the second cohort of Techstars Physical Health accelerator in Fort Worth.
“And it's really completely changed the business model. I've met so many amazing people. I have a new investor pipeline. We have some strategic partnerships in the works. It's just a really exciting moment that I never would have come to without the massive amount of support and encouragement.”
Carbone is the founder of Brilliantly, a bra insert designed to alleviate persistent feelings of coldness.
This all began with personal loss.
Carbone, believing she might have a genetic predisposition to breast cancer, took matters into her own hands.
She underwent a preventive mastectomy and implant reconstruction, an increasingly more common procedure to mitigate risks of a genetic abnormality. Her mother died from metastatic breast cancer at age 49.
“I wanted to spare my own children from losing their mom too early,” she says. “I chose an option [her mother] didn’t have.”
In the aftermath, she discovered that the preventive mastectomy came with a quality-of-life issue: a loss of identity and connection to her body. Specifically, she was constantly cold.
When a breast implant is placed for reconstruction, there is less insulating fatty tissue present than in the natural breast. There also are no blood vessels present, and the hypothalamus, the almond-sized area of the brain responsible for governing our internal body temperature, doesn’t register the temperature.
Some women, including Carbone, have suffered burns trying jerry-rigged solutions, such as inserting hand warmers inside the bra.
“This is where Brilliantly began,” says Carbone, who found it was a common problem for many women like her.
Now there is an app for that.
Brilliantly Warm is a bra insert that enables the user to control the temperature from a phone app.
“Hearing the stories from all these other women made me feel like I could really help improve lives in a way that I never imagined possible,” Carbone says. “Breast cancer is occurring in younger and younger women. Hopefully, these young women are going into remission, but they have decades of their life left. If you have these issues that bother you every day for decades, we should be solving them. We should have these conversations and understand how to live in a new body in a way that's happy and comfortable.”
Carbone, a resident of Providence in The Ocean State, has a background in art, art history to be specific. She worked 10 years as a curator of museums throughout New York and New England, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, and the Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design.
This shift in careers required learning an entirely new set of skills. She says she knew almost nothing about building a business or creating a physical product at the outset, notably fundraising, engineering, and marketing. She needed to know somewhat of the engineering so she could advocate for her product.
“I ended up talking to hundreds of women, finding out this was a really common problem, but also talked about all kinds of quality of life issues related to breast cancer and preventative mastectomy,” Carbone says. “And once I sort of confirmed that it was worth making a product and that there was other good work to do, I ended up hiring medical device engineers to help. Even though it's not a medical device, safety was my top priority.”
Interestingly, she found out after launching and seeking feedback that roughly a quarter of consumers were from outside the breast cancer community, women on skiing trips or at the ice rink all day watching their kids play hockey. There were all kinds of reasons women wanted a sort of discrete warming.
“There is a whole body of research about the places on your body where you most acutely perceive temperature,” she says. “Your chest just happens to be a place where you have more nerves that perceive temperature.”
That would seem to stand to reason considering the vital organs there in the core.
With this knowledge of a broader consumer base, Carbone says she commissioned a healthcare public policy graduate student to do a review on data and clinical studies on other things Brilliantly Warm could possibly help with, from breastfeeding to menstrual cramps to thyroid disorder. She found there is a gap in the research, but she has heard from the nursing mothers, who tell her that it helps ease discomfort. She has heard from those dealing with menstrual cramps who deploy Brilliantly Warm to other parts within the wardrobe.
"I’m not sure I can call this business a success yet, [but] I’ve encountered many micro-successes along the way that have made me feel more capable and accomplished," she says. "Watching Brilliantly evolve and grow into a company that can help all kinds of people feel more comfortable is so incredibly rewarding."
Freelance writer Sarah Jordan contributed to this report.