Bear Workwear and Viable Ads win 2023 Slaight New Venture Competition

A clothing company for women who work in the skilled trades and a digital mobile ad company have won $25,000 each in the 21st annual Slaight New Venture Competition at the Ted Rogers School of Management.

The Slaight New Venture Competition is an annual pitch competition hosted by Enactus TMU (external link)  and presented by the Slaight Family Foundation. Each year, for the past 20 years, this competition has given TRSM students the opportunity to present their businesses for the opportunity to win $25,000 in startup seed funding courtesy of the Slaight Family Foundation to help bring their ideas to life and scale their businesses. In recent years, it has expanded to two prizes for one student presenter who identifies as female and one who identifies as male. Both options are open for students who identify as non-binary. 

“My father, Allan Slaight, believed in life-long learning and supporting future generations of entrepreneurs,” said Gary Slaight, president and CEO of Slaight Communications. “He was passionate about creating opportunities for students with entrepreneurial minds to build their business acumen.”

“As displayed by this year's competition finalists, the Ted Rogers School of Management continues to be a hub and leader for entrepreneurship and innovation. This year’s winners, Bear Workwear and Viable Ads, continue to fill gaps in the market by addressing solutions to problems in a thoughtful and innovative way. I know my father would be proud of the calibre of entrepreneurs that the Ted Rogers School and the Slaight New Venture Competition continues to produce."

Six finalists made their presentations to judges in-person April 5, 2023. The top three female-led ventures included Bear Workwear, Travel Buddy and Surf Beni (external link) . The top three male-led ventures included Fravi Sauce (external link) , Viable Ads (external link)  and COIN. Finalists were given three minutes to present their pitch followed by a seven minute Q&A session. 

Bear Workwear

Claire Chisholm, a third-year entrepreneurship and strategy student at the Ted Rogers School, had been working in the skilled trades for 10 years and found it difficult to find clothing to wear at work. Skilled trades such as construction, landscaping and painting are traditionally male-dominated fields in Canada. When Chisholm went shopping, most of the options were made for men, and when she did find women’s work wear, it didn’t fit nor was it functional or comfortable. While working a summer job in landscaping, she met a new colleague, Kate Chantler. The pair bonded over the lack of women’s work wear.

Chisholm and Chantler co-founded Bear Workwear, a clothing brand designed for women who work in skilled trades. As female participation in trades increases, so does the need for workwear and equipment designed for them.

“The women who are entering the trades are buying clothing on the market and nothing has been made with their demographic in mind,” Chisholm said. “They're largely buying men's workwear because it offers the best durability, which can sometimes be unsafe.”

Chantler added that women’s work wear on the market from popular international brands has essentially been sized down from men's specifications and it doesn't fit women’s dimensions, their needs or differences. 

Bear Workwear’s clothing line is made with an understanding that women have different sizing needs and style preferences that vary from traditional industry standards. It addresses a gap in the market that leaves so many women buying ill-fitting clothing by offering a solution that provides function, durability, and comfort, all while delivering exceptional aesthetic appeal.

“We're confident that the clothing that we offer is going to provide professionalism and strong aesthetic appeal that women like wearing without compromising function and durability at work,” Chisholm said. 

The Slaight New Ventures prize will help Bear Workwear get started on marketing with a new website, and cover the cost of materials so they can begin manufacturing their clothing line. 

Viable Ads

Viable Ads (external link)  is a digital out-of-home advertising startup created by Alejandro Domenech-Pereda, fifth-year GMS and finance student, and Callum Maclean, a fourth-year economics and finance student at the Ted Rogers School. 

The startup came into being during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Domenech-Pereda was working as an Uber Eats worker to make ends meet after being laid off. While biking across the city, he realized that tips were extremely variable. Some weeks he would make great money, some weeks he wouldn’t. “People who are usually doing Uber Eats, it's not because they want to, but because they have to. So, I realized there must be a way to make a little bit more income,” he said. 

Domenech-Pereda had met fellow Ted Rogers School student Callum Maclean while they were both interning at investor relations firm Bristol Capital IR. 

The two started experimenting with the Viable concept. At first it was a little license plate-sized frame with an IED display. Over a few months of design and ideation, they came up with the idea for the V-Bag, a large, square refrigerated backpack - like an UberEats delivery bag - with real estate for advertising all over it. The team found and worked with manufacturers from Alibaba.com to produce the second prototype. 

“We were able to analyze and reverse engineer the bag and see what we needed,” Maclean explained. “We could do this ourselves and cut all the costs.”

The V-Bag allows advertisers to dynamically display their advertisements. Data gathered from the V-Bag flows downstream to Viable’s interactive client dashboard – V-Dash – which calculates and displays key metrics, such as impressions, audience demographics, and campaign performance rates.

Competing in the Slaight New Venture Competition was about proving themselves, Maclean said. 

“We have all this traction and success with companies, but getting funding is just more validation that adds to our company resumé,” Maclean said. “When investors see this, as we get sort of closer and closer to the stage where we look at funding, it's really important that we have credibility and Slaight was an excellent opportunity to build that.”

“And at the end of the day, it also expedites our process of helping gig workers,”  Domenech-Pereda said, adding that they have a network of 110 mobile food couriers. “This helps us get closer to being able to help out those 110 who we've already signed on.”

The judges for the 2023 competition were Robert Gierkink (Entrepreneur in Residence, General Catalyst Partners), Braden Handley (Co-founder and President, Inkbox), and Noura Sakkijha (Co-Founder and CEO, Mejuri).