In the fourth longlist of our 2023 Futures 100 Innovators, we reveal The Future Laboratory’s chosen innovators and change-makers that are set to disrupt the lifestyle categories in 2023 and beyond.
Each month, we profile 10 brands, businesses and people that our team of researchers and analysts have identified as driving forward innovation across multiple industries, ranging from beauty and wellness to luxury, design, retail and travel.
In October 2023, our complete Futures 100 Innovators list will be presented to a panel of industry judges who will select and award their 10 leading innovators.
April’s future shapers include rebellious bakers, Web3 artists and dating app disruptors.
You can nominate your own innovators via: futures100innovators@thefuturelaboratory.com
Personalised beauty regimes in one place
Kristin Cardwell and Alex Beyer are on a mission to build a hyper-personalised Farfetch of beauty. They co-founded Sourcerie, an e-commerce platform encouraging consumers to shop for beauty products based on community-driven data and reviews. The former L’Oréal and Palantir executives built Sourcerie after suffering from eczema for the first time and feeling overwhelmed by treatment advice. ‘The best recommendations, and the ones that actually worked, always came from people just like us,’ they told LS:N Global. ‘We wondered – can’t we find a way to scale this?’ Sourcerie has big ambitions and aims to be the place brands and retailers visit to connect with beauty consumers seamlessly. ‘We’re not just a personalised marketplace. Our vision is to become the global tech platform for every beauty and personal care decision.’
Advancing vaginal health research
As part of her post-doctoral research at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, Boston-based Aakanksha Gulati co-created the world’s first ‘vagina on a chip’, an inch-long polymer rectangle mimicking the human vaginal tissue environment, including its communities of microbes. Gulati is currently using the innovation to investigate bacterial vaginosis (BV), a disease that afflicts nearly 30% of reproductive-aged women around the globe, according to Science Daily. ‘A major stumbling block for that effort was that there were no good pre-clinical models that could be used to study which therapies can actually treat BV in human tissues,’ she said. Her team hopes others will use the chip routinely to advance vaginal research. Introducing a new tool in a medical area that remains chronically under-researched and misunderstood is a significant leap forward.
Let them read cake
Baker Tanya Bush and food writer Aliza Abarbanel met over Instagram in 2021 and bonded over their desire to create thought-provoking food media. In spring 2022, they launched the first edition of Cake Zine, their independent magazine that uses sweets to explore and challenge societal norms. The issue, entitled Sexy Cake, delved into erotic bakeries. ‘Our themes are niche but expansive,’ they say. Its second volume, released in autumn 2022 and cheekily named Wicked Cake, explored the history of arsenic and evaluated the risks AI could pose to the art of baking. The upcoming Humble Pie issue, scheduled for spring 2023, will be a tangible and symbolic exploration of pie-making and humility. Bush and Abarbanel serve a much-needed slice of subversion to the food media landscape. The duo also see Cake Zine as the anchor point for larger enterprises. ‘We are very interested in making the magazine a social object,’ they told LS:N Global. ‘A community for people interested in using food as the impetus for broader cultural exploration.’
Low-carbon leather goods
Maison Maes is a Paris-based accessories brand on a mission to make the luxury leather industry more eco-friendly. Founded in 2020 by former engineer Romain Boubert and graphic designer Géraldine Saquy, the brand aims to ‘finally bring bags and small leather goods into the 21st century and challenge the luxury status quo’.
By combining legacy French craftsmanship with innovative leather textiles, Maison Maes self-defines as the world’s first low-carbon haute maroquinerie retailer. Recipient of the Butterfly Mark, which recognises ambitious investments in environmental, social and governance, the brand refuses to use any materials traditionally found in leather goods manufacturing. Maison Maes made its first collection of handbags with its patented Desserto vegan cactus leather, which consumes nine times less energy and emits nearly 20 times fewer greenhouse gases than animal leather, according to the brand. Boubert and Saquy want to continue exploring bio-based materials and are determined to show the fashion industry and consumers alike that cactus leather goods can be equally luxurious and sustainable.
Purposeful culinary pop-ups
After completing his master’s degree in wine at Sup’Agro in Montpellier, France, Luca Pronzato visited 30 countries in under a year. Inspired by the cultures he’d observed and the cuisines he enjoyed, Pronzato returned home to Paris and founded We Are Ona, a community of food creatives dedicated to creating temporary culturally inclusive experiences. ‘We want to turn food talents into creative directors, similarly to couturiers in the fashion industry,’ the We Are Ona team told LS:N Global. Ona means wave in Catalan and is reminiscent of the company’s nomadic collective sweep into different cities each year, opening fully operational pop-up restaurants. Pronzato created ephemeral dining experiences at an old stable in the French town of Arles, on the rooftop of a 19th-century townhouse in Mexico City, and at the Venice Biennale. In future, We Are Ona aims to be known as a hub that nurtures all types of creatives connected with the food industry, ‘from food workers to artists, ceramists, florists and designers’, empowering them to deliver unique and culturally rich food experiences.
Digital Black art pioneer
Nubianizm, aka Rica, is a 27-year-old medical prosthetist and fine pencil artist specialising in hyper-realistic portraits celebrating Black people. The Londoner’s stunning work has gone viral online a few times, starting with her vibrant portrait of actress Viola Davis in 2018. Then a finger prosthetic she helped design for a Black patient as part of a collaboration with London Prosthetics silicone clinic attracted over 1.1m views on Twitter in February 2023. After learning the inner workings of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralisation, the blockchain and Ethereum from her Black peers in the art and web development communities, Rica entered the world of Web3 in 2022. There, she created a community of Black art enthusiasts and first-time buyers. Some of her recent work includes a Black Renaissance series, exploring 17th- and 18th-century art from a Black perspective. ‘It’s good building ground,’ she told LS:N Global. ‘It’s allowed a lot more opportunities than [marginalised] people would be able to get IRL.’
Textile trickery against facial recognition
While pursuing a research doctorate at Milan Polytechnic, Rachele Didero, co-founder of fashion-tech start-up Cap_able, patented a groundbreaking fabric combining fashion and computer science. Woven with adversarial patches, her line of made-in-Italy knitted garments protects a wearer’s facial biometric data without covering their face. The technology also confuses AI computers into wrongly categorising the wearer as a dog, zebra or giraffe. Didero told LS:N Global: ‘For me, this is a mission and an all-around passion.’
She created the collection to raise awareness of the improper use of facial recognition technology and warn of the potential dangers of unchecked tech advancements. She aims to stay one step ahead of the increasingly fast-paced tech-fuelled world. ‘When I’m in front of a camera, I don’t have a choice of whether I give it my data or not,’ she said. ‘We’re creating [safety] garments that allow you to choose.’
Fun fashion staples from XXS to 6X
26-year-old Yumi Nu has made history once already. In 2021, she was the first Asian-American plus-size woman featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She may do it again with Blueki, the energetic size-inclusive clothing line she created out of frustration. Nu has been modelling for over 13 years and has always faced limited high-quality clothing options. According to the model, Blueki’s locally made pieces fill gaps in any plus-size consumer’s wardrobe, starting with hers.
The first drop in 2022 included second-skin cut-out dresses, lace-up corsets and coquettish minis, all available in sizes XXS to 6X. Created in collaboration with sustainability-focused 3D knitwear factory Tailored Industry in Brooklyn, the drop aimed to ‘minimise excess waste’ with small batches and made-to-order requests. Nu wants to explore looser-fitting textiles and limited-edition items, including slip dresses and cargo pants in upcoming drops. ‘I do understand that the plus-size customer is tired of only stretch pieces,’ she told Vogue.
Blueki’s raison d’être is not only to be fun and bold, but also to serve consumers that the fashion industry rudely and routinely excludes.
AR-fuelled fitting rooms
When the women in Haniff Brown’s life found that their online purchases didn’t fit in real life, they tasked him with boxing up and returning the goods. The frustration with this endless back-and-forth process inspired the first-generation Jamaican immigrant investment banker to collaborate with data scientist Jie Pei to launch an AR-powered clothing platform. Founded in 2018, Fit:Match aims to make the fitting room experience more accurate and comfortable for online and offline consumers. The technology takes a 20-second 3D scan of the shopper’s body with great accuracy before matching it to a database of digital twins to recommend the best-fitting items. Available in select Macy’s and Savage x Fenty stores in the US, consumers can soon access Fit:Match through its app. Brown’s team aim to offer consumers a more relaxed and intuitive fitting room experience while creating new beginnings and boosting sales for retailers. ‘Our challenge is innovating a product, a consumer behaviour and a business model all at once,’ said Brown.
Digital mingling for real-life community-building
Old-school personal ads in the back of women-run erotica magazine On Our Backs inspired queer dating app Lex. ‘Those personals were hot, witty and cool. The women knew exactly who they were and what they wanted,’ the app’s founder and CEO Kel Rakowski told LS:N Global, live from New York. The ultra-minimalist text-based app has recently repositioned itself as a social platform allowing both platonic and romantic connections. Although its redesign now supports emojis and has made profile pictures bigger, its retro vibe remains. The company still sees itself as a unique space for queer women to express themselves and bond with their peers. Freed from likes, reactions or follower counts, the app encourages users to congregate in niche groups based on their interests, such as Bird-Watchers of Central Park, Mushroom Foragers of LA and Chinatown Basketball Crew, among others. Rakowski wants the app to turn online connections into real-life communities. ‘We’re building Lex to find real, authentic and slow connections.’
Get to know our full list of global disruptors and change-makers creating the future across 10 sectors, and learn about our sponsorship packages here.
