Mid-stride with Lori Coulter
She ran a concession stand before she could drive. Her mother was her first angel investor. The customers were baseball parents killing time in Missouri summer heat - and Lori Coulter was already learning what she'd spend her career proving: that the right product, at the right moment, for the right person, sells itself.
That instinct followed her to Baylor University's business school, through an MBA at Washington University's Olin School, and into a first company that did something strange for its time: made swimsuits to order using 3D body-scan software. The company didn't become a household name. But its technology did something more valuable - it gave Lori a dataset that most fashion designers would never touch.
In 2016, she and co-founder Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin used that foundation to launch Summersalt. The premise was disarmingly simple: women hate shopping for swimwear not because they have the wrong bodies, but because the industry makes suits for the wrong data. Summersalt would use information from 1.5 million measurements pulled from 10,000 women's body scans to build garments that actually fit. Direct-to-consumer. Under $100. Italian fabrics. UPF 50. No middlemen, no markup, no apology.
The brand that came out of that thesis hit Vogue, Elle, Forbes, People, and InStyle. It earned a spot on CNBC's list of the world's most promising startups. It raised more than $30 million in venture capital. It sold 4 million garments and served 1.2 million customers. It launched collaborations with Rifle Paper Co. and L.L. Bean - the kind of partnerships you can't engineer with hustle alone; they come from having built something people genuinely trust.
Lori's Summersalt wasn't just a swimwear brand. It was a quiet argument: that women's bodies have always been fine, that the problem was always the clothes. That argument traveled across travelwear, loungewear, activewear - and landed in the wardrobes of over a million women who stopped dreading the fitting room.
She's now also in the room where the funding happens. As an Operator Advisor at Redbud VC - the Columbia, Missouri firm backing early-stage founders - Lori brings the specific knowledge that can't be taught in a classroom: how to pitch when your product is novel, how to rebuild after a hard quarter, how to keep building when the "no" today doesn't mean "no" forever. She says that last part from experience.
At Washington University, she sits on the Board of Trustees, advises the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation, serves on the Kemper Art Museum board, and teaches in the Sam Fox School as adjunct faculty. She helped the university rethink its entire visual identity. She speaks in the "The League" advanced entrepreneurship course and has hosted classes at Summersalt headquarters - because she understands that the best thing an operator can do for the ecosystem is stay in it.
She is married with two sons. She was on the water ski team in college. Her favorite Summersalt styles are the Sidestroke and Plunge, in sangria. She is exactly the kind of founder who doesn't talk about disruption - she just builds things that work and lets other people write the press releases.