Greendale woman gets ‘Project Pitch It’ $10,000 prize for her handcrafted cosmetic brushes

Greendale resident Izabelle Villafuerte, founder of Empresaria Cosmetics, took house the Peg Ann/David Gruber Project Pitch It $10,000 hard cash award this week on Job Pitch It.

Villafuerte and her father handcraft cosmetics brushes employing wooden. She commenced this enterprise owing to a lack of variety in the cosmetics current market when it will come to the aesthetics of make-up brushes. The designs of the brushes tie into Villafuerte’s qualifications as a Latina girl. The most well-known style resembles a bolero toy. The brushes are also vegan and cruelty-no cost.

“I’m right here currently because I want to discover how to scale this (organization) as it’s nonetheless just my father and I in my garage,” Villafuerte stated. “I actually want to broaden our attain in Milwaukee and Wisconsin as our most important customer base is (currently) in California.”

Villafuerte hopes to get her brushes into retail areas and is hunting to place some dollars into advertising and marketing, as all her gross sales have been by way of term of mouth on social media.

Milwaukee resident Jared Judge, founder of BookLive, was the winner of the American Household/We Energies $1,500 award.

BookLive delivers schooling and software package to support musicians make a living off undertaking.

“I desired a job in new music and so I did what absolutely everyone explained to me to do – acquire classes, get a diploma in songs and I was really making an attempt tricky and it all form of culminated in me getting auditions,” Decide said.

As Choose was using auditions, he confronted a sequence of rejections. He questioned professors at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Lubar College of Business what he must do to be prosperous. Following learning some organization principles, Judge then introduced his individual marriage ceremony band, which grew to become a 6-determine a 12 months organization.

To assistance his peers in the musical market, Choose also commenced sharing his newfound enterprise awareness.

Through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, BookLive pivoted to also allow for “Virtual Serenades,” a element that enabled users to deliver close friends and family a reside recording of their favorite tune performed by a community artist.

“The issue was not acquiring sufficient do the job to make a living. The difficulty then became I was far too occupied,” he said. “I desired a manager to take care of me even though I was handling these other gigs. I could not find the money for 1, but I believed what if there was an app that could do that?”

Above 1,000 musicians are currently applying BookLive and they have collectively attained more than $2 million. A obstacle the firm is going through is generating the system cellular-helpful. Judge is hoping to use a mobile app developer to choose BookLive to the future stage.

Brian Fox was the winner of the Jendusa/UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship Center $5,000 award.

Fox, a resident of Eldorado (in Fond du Lac County), established his business Angler Armor following enduring vandalism in his personal marina. His neighbor had their boat stolen, which led Fox to get started wondering about ways to enhance safety.

He invented a completely digital boat alarm for tournament-design and style fishing boats and has a patent pending. If a boat employing the Angler Armor alarm leaves a established geofence region, the operator of the boat will get authentic-time monitoring notifications on their phone.

“My brother, who is an avid bass fisherman, questioned me, “Could I consider that alarm thought and switch it into a little something for a bass boat?’ because there is absolutely nothing like it on the industry,” Fox stated.

He instructed the Task Pitch It moguls that only 1 in 10 stolen fishing boats are at any time recovered and the cost of a totally rigged fishing boat can technique $100,000. Fox’s item has attracted the awareness of professional fisherman, who he hopes can grow to be influencers in marketing the alarm.

Task Pitch It airs Saturdays at 10:35 p.m. and Sundays at 11:30 a.m. in Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin on WISN-Television Channel 12. BizTimes Milwaukee is a media spouse for Venture Pitch It.