Hold onto your seats folks – you’re about to take a roller coaster ride with these two startup co-founders!

Our guests, Rajia Abdelaziz and Ray Hamilton, are the founders of invisaWear, a safety jewelry company that creates smart jewelry and accessories with advanced safety technology, allowing users to instantly alert friends, family, and police during an emergency.

Rajia and Ray didn’t set out to start a tech company. They met in their sophomore year in an engineering lab at UMass Lowell and became good friends. But due to a series of events in her senior year, Rajia realized there was a strong need for a stylish, smart jewelry with safety technology product and approached her pal Ray with her idea. He responded with the suggestion “Let’s do this as our senior year class project!” Three years later, invisaWear is a vibrant, online safety jewelry company.

Since starting the company, invisaWear has been featured in many newspapers, news stations and magazines, and Rajia and Ray were named one of the top ten startups to watch in the Boston area. Over the last 12 months they finalized product development and began shipping products. And the product is already saving lives!

I met these two remarkable founders in the fall of 2016, when invisaWear was a “newborn," and I had the good fortune to be assigned as their Coach and Mentor through the Entrepreneurship for All accelerator program, where I volunteer as a Mentor.

I’ve had a front row seat to invisaWear’s growth over the last 2 and a half years, watching in awe and wonder, the extraordinary effort and commitment Rajia and Ray have made to their startup.

They give new meaning to grace under fire; in fact, if you look up hustle in the dictionary, you’ll see their photos! They are the nicest people you will ever meet, and it is a sincere privilege and honor to call them friends.

No, it wasn’t all champagne and caviar moments.

Please click the play button to find out how these two college friends took their idea and turned into a viable, profitable business! Rajia and Ray share all their startup struggles and successes, including:

•Telling their parents “we’re starting our own business” while turning down job offers
•Finding mentors and attorneys
•Engineering a product safety technology into a stylish design
•Competing in pitch events
•Applying to … and participating in… free accelerator programs
•Bootstrapping to investor funding
•Identifying a target market and proving their value proposition
•Creating a prototype, testing and manufacturing the product
•Go-to-market strategy
•Shipping those first orders
•Meeting demand
•How entrepreneurship has enhanced their lives
•Savings lives with their product – a very special story

You will love Rajia and Ray, and you will benefit from the nail-biting moments along with the laugh-out-loud moments from their startup stories.

To purchase an invisaWear necklace, bracelet, keychain and matching accessories, please click here: https://www.invisawear.com/collections/, and be sure to sign up for their email while you’re there.

Please follow and connect with invisaWear on:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/invisaWear/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/invisawear/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/invisaWear
LinkedIin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/invisawear/about/
Website: https://www.invisawear.com/

Rajia Abdelaziz is the CEO of invisaWear and holds a dual degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer science from UMass Lowell. In the rare occasions when Rajia’s not working, she's usually watching movies or swimming.

Ray Hamilton, the CTO of invisaWear, graduated from UMass Lowell with a degree in electrical engineering. Ray is passionate about helping others and focuses on making a difference in society.

If you need startup mentoring – please visit my website, http://andelyons.com where you’ll find all the ways I can add value to your startup journey: strategy calls, pitch deck and one page business snapshot coaching, WBENC application support for women business owners - I’d be honored to mentor you through whatever you’re going through – so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you’d like to receive an alert whenever I post a new episode, please follow me on Spreaker, Stitcher, iTunes, Spotify or Google Podcasts… and let’s connect on social media!

Listeners - thank you so much for tuning in - I am genuinely grateful for your time and presence. Stay strong, stay focused – and please remember – you’ve got this – Cheers!

Ande ♥