Hey Glow Gang!

What a week! We hosted our first event in London and it was the BEST! 🥰 I’ve popped a recap below.

In this week’s newsletter, we’re chatting with two of the coolest women I’ve ever met: Harmony Pilobello and Shilpa Iyengar, the duo behind Alterre. Plus some cool firsts in the sports and entertainment industries 👀

Let's get glowing

-Shilpa

P.S. Eid Mubarak if you’ve been observing Ramadan ✨

London Event Recap

Glowreel x Soho House Present: I Am Woman. And I've Got Ceilings To Shatter.

A massive thank you to everyone who attended our first London event on Monday. It was so great to meet you, and to hear your impressive questions for our guest speakers.

Extra special shoutout to our guest speakers: Shweta Aggarwal and Anita Bhagwandas who shared their personal stories and tips about navigating and overcoming beauty standards.

We’re looking forward to hosting more events! Where should we visit next?!

News Of The Week

Breaking Barriers, Making Moves 👊🏽

Entertainment

Encore! 👏🏽 Larissa FastHorse is the first Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. The former ballet dancer is the playwright behind The Thanksgiving Play. FastHorse’s play is a satirical comedy where four performers struggle to devise a school pageant that is historically accurate and respectful of Native people. “I truly want the audience to feel invited to the conversation and to have fun.”

In more firsts, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy will be the first woman and the first person of colour to direct a Star Wars film.

Sport

Marathon, with a dash of spice 🤌🏽 Madhusmita Jena just ran the Manchester Marathon, which is an impressive feat in itself. But she went one step further, running the 42km race in a sari🥻. You go girl!

See also: Sports agent Nicole Lynn is making headlines for negotiating the biggest NFL deal in history. Hey Nicole, can you negotiate all our deals for us too?!

More News Nuggets

Extra Nuggets 👀

• ARtist for all 👩🏽‍🎨 We’re tackling racial bias in tech and beauty with the ARtist app. Join the waitlist for launch day access!

• When one of us wins, we all win 👏🏽 Janelle Jones on how lifting up people on the margins helps everyone else, too.

• Best of the best 🤩 The annual TIME 100 list is out, and you’ll be pleased to see some of your favourite woman of colour icons on there.

Glowreel Recos

What we’re loving this week

We’ve got two book recommendations for you, following our live event earlier this week.

Read:

The Black Rose: My Story of Colourism, Silently Lived by Millions by Shweta Aggarwal. Shweta’s personal story is both powerful, inspiring and eye-opening whether you’ve experienced colourism or not.

Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards by Anita Bhagwandas. Anita’s book is a deep dive into the history of beauty standards, with elements of her personal experiences and a whole lot of sass and humour thrown in!

Support BIPOC Women Owned Businesses

Shop your favourite BIPOC woman founded brands in Glowreel’s Little Purple Book! This week’s recommended product: Glass Botanical Reed Diffuser from Nikita by Niki

£20 (ships worldwide)

Trailblazing Woman Interview

Alterre: for sustainable and stylish shoes that empower women!

Harmony Pilobello and Shilpa Iyengar are the founders of Alterre: interchangeable shoes that are stylish, comfortable and underpinned by an ethos of giving back to people and the planet.

Alterre's end-to-end process is backed by ethical practices, sustainable materials and women-led businesses and suppliers as much as possible.

We caught up with Harmony and Shilpa to hear more about their journey behind creating Alterre, their favourite Alterre shoe, and their top tip for blazing your own trail. Let’s go!

Hi Harmony and Shilpa! So nice to meet you - tell me a bit about yourselves.

Shilpa: I grew up in Florida and moved to New York for college. I’m an Indian person who went into the arts in a family full of doctors and engineers! I met Harmony at college - at Parsons. We bonded over a shared love of dark humour, and travel! We tried a few different things when we left school before going down the interchangeable shoe route and starting Alterre.

Harmony: I grew up with immigrant parents and we travelled a lot. Fun fact, I hadn’t lived anywhere for more than two and a half years before I moved to New York for college. Shilpa and I stayed friends after college and worked on a few things together before Alterre. We made garments for non-profit organisations, and a hiking shoe for children that would extend as the child grew.

How did the idea for Alterre come about?

Shilpa: We've always had this interest in innovative footwear, and then we started to focus more on what we would want. Something that caters to women who love shoes but also travel a lot and have really tiny apartments and even smaller closets!

Harmony: We spent about two years working in a small windowless studio going back and forth on ideas of how to make this work. The shoes needed to be comfortable and as easy as possible to change it up. That’s why we decided to do interchangeable straps. The name came after days and days of talking back and forth, going over every single word we could think of. We wanted the shoes to represent the idea of altering your ego, So that’s how we landed with Alterre!

Your favourite Alterre shoe?

Shilpa: It definitely depends on the season and where I am. I recently moved to Miami and I’m wearing the Silver Bell Sandal because it’s kind of dressed up but also really casual. When I was in New York I wore the Doe Slide a lot. My favourite from our last collection is the Galaxy Boot!

Harmony: The Doe Slide is my favourite right now - I can wear it all year round in California. It's dressy enough that if I were to go to a networking event, for example, I wouldn't feel like I had to wear high heels. I could just wear the Doe slides and put on a metallic strap to add a bit of glamour to the look.

You share a lot about social responsibility and sustainability on your website. How have some of your life experiences shaped your passion and commitment to social responsibility, and what impact do you hope to have through Alterre?

Harmony: This is such a meaningful question! I was thinking about this recently because I was interested in sustainability in college and I was wondering what led me to that point. I honestly think that it comes with the mindset of having immigrant parents - we were taught to always use every single thing that we had. Everything from clothing to food - the full spectrum of things. Carrying that mindset into school at Parsons, it was shocking to see how wasteful the industry could be, and it was even more shocking to see how deeply impacted garment workers are by the behaviour of fast fashion companies.

So sustainability and social responsibility is something that’s been important to us from the beginning. Now as we're growing, we're continuously re-committing ourselves throughout the process. Like every time we design something we think, how can we make this more sustainable? And how is it going to affect not just the business, but the entire industry and the world. We’re a small business, but we'd like to think that cumulatively it all makes the difference.

We also have intentionally tried to work with women led businesses as much as possible. So even our fulfilment centre and our factory are women led.

Your top tip for how other women can blaze their own trail and make a difference in the world?

Shilpa: Know when to be kind and when to be firm. And, expand your connection with good people - you never know when something will come of it.

Harmony: Stand your ground if you believe in yourself. You have to believe in yourself, because no one else might. Also kindness goes a long way!

Shop Alterre here.

Lioness Thoughts

Nominate A Shoutout

Tell us about someone doing cool shit.

It can be you, your friends or family or someone else you know. Whether you’ve just started a book club, are creating artistic makeup looks for fun, or are doing some research and want to hear from women of colour. We want to share thing cool things you’re doing with a community shoutout!

Please send your nominations to [email protected] or DM us on our socials :)

This week's email was brought to you by Shilpa Bhim, founder of Glowreel. You can see more of her work at www.shilpabhim.com or follow her on Instagram @shilpa.bhim

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