Kristel Bell, CEO and Founder of Surprise Powerz, joins ChedHER to discuss how she's creating dolls to spark curiosity in young girls and inspire them to get more involved in STEM.

chedHER

These Dolls are Designed to Educate and inspire Young Girls

joining us now is Crystal Bell Ceo and founder of surprise Powers Crystal, one of your daughters is actually Astro the astronaut. Tell us a little bit more about that doll but also about you know, just the surprise powers and how these dolls are really working towards inspiring young girls and stem. Absolutely and thank you for having me in honor of national space Day. I am here with Astro the astronaut. Astro is one of four dolls in surprise power stem doll line Astro, the astronaut Cody, the coder vera, the vet and Maria, the math magician are building curiosity, creativity, critical thinking and confidence and girls starting at an early age surprise powers dolls are here too. Hope shaped girls beliefs as to what they can be successful at and show our girls from an early age that there are girls that look like them talk like them and are pursuing stem and that they can be successful at pursuing stem too. So many things that I love about these dolls from the representation to you know, highlighting just the power you know behind some of these fields and how powerful women can be in these fields. But I'm just curious behind the story behind this. What sparked the idea and why did you want to do this? Yeah, so surprise powers the story behind it is that it started with my mom. Um you know as a young kid, my mom made sure that her Children were very much involved in stem from coding classes to engineering programs to science fairs. If it had anything to do with stem then we probably did it. Um I didn't recognize until I was a little older than my mom was a hidden figure herself. She broke traditional gender barriers by obtaining a computer science degree. Um during a time when computer science was just starting out and where there was still a lack of representation of women in stem and especially women of color. So just understanding how much she persevered in order to you know, obtain this stem degree. This inspired me to create surprise powers dolls to help our girls to also break barriers and solve problems and have fun doing it in stem the next generation of women like your mother, I absolutely love that you started this company four months before the pandemic talk about like a challenge in front of you. What was that like the launch of the company and how has the business grown in these times? Absolutely. So you know, starting a business is already challenging but starting a business during a pandemic, you know, add on additional challenges. You know, there are increased prices on everything, the supply chain disruptions, you know, and then there's the barrier to accessing capital. However, there was a light in my tunnel um you know during the early stages of my business, I receive some really big purchase before I received some purchase orders from an amazing, amazing big box retailer. And so I was super excited for the opportunity and but I knew that I still had the challenge of needing to access capital and that's where Chase stepped in and supported me. Um My business banker Umberto was absolutely amazing, and then my business consultant for minority entrepreneurs, alejandra, she's just absolutely terrific, and together they helped to connect me with the right resources to get the access to capital that I needed to fund um these purchase orders and I have to say I would have never imagined that I would be very successful, you know, during my first year of business um in or outside of a pandemic, what are some of the other careers? I'm just curious that you would like to add to the line of dolls and what are your plans for, continued to grow? What already has been a pretty successful business? Yeah, so um this is where it gets really fun. Um so for the next set of dolls, which will be four dolls, I have three that I know that I want to create, one would be um an environmental scientists, as we all know, our planet is gonna need some support and our girls need to be prepared to support it. And then um an engineer has been highly requested by early childhood educators, a nurse. We we've all been in the pandemic, we all know that there's hardly land for nursing. Um So those are the three that I have, if if anyone has an idea for the four feel free to reach out. Um and then as far as the business goes, I plan to Further tell the story about the brand, you know, by creating storybooks, additional toys, you know, just different things like that growing the product line, I've got like 10 seconds. I'm just curious where can people go to get these dolls? Go to Surprise Powers dot com. Please check us out. Listen to the dolls talk. I might be scrolling over there later on to get a few from my nieces. I absolutely love this concept, Crystal belt Time and your insight Ceo and founder of Surprise Powers.