Semester in San Francisco led Gabrielle Whittle to an Innovator Award
Recent mechanical engineering alum Gabrielle Whittle, E’21, received a Women Who Empower Innovator Award for her design of a transformable high-heel shoe that can be worn as a flat or a high heel.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Ian Thomsen. Main photo: Gabrielle Whittle, who recently graduated in mechanical engineering, received an inaugural $10,000 Innovator Award for her development of an adjustable sole and removable heel that will enable her product to be worn as a flat or a high-heeled shoe. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Gabrielle Whittle was searching for the means to express herself creatively. She found her way forward last year at Northeastern’s Bay Area location while attending the Semester in San Francisco program.
Her immersion in an entrepreneurial environment inspired Whittle to develop a transformable high heel for womens’ shoes.
Whittle was inspired to pursue her entrepreneurial instinct during a Semester in San Francisco last year. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Whittle, who recently graduated in mechanical engineering, received an inaugural $10,000 Innovator Award from Northeastern’s Women Who Empower inclusion and entrepreneurship initiative. The awards recognize 19 women who are graduates or current students at Northeastern. They are receiving a total of $100,000 in grants to help fuel 17 ventures.
Whittle has been working with a Northeastern consultant to develop an adjustable sole and removable heel that will enable her product to be worn as a flat or a high-heel shoe.
“Anyone who has worn heels understands the inconvenience and the pain associated with them,” says Whittle, who has formed Phoenix Footwear to develop her shoe. “The goal is to make it easier, more convenient, and just more fun to wear high heels.”
Whittle had been on co-op in the Bay Area for the preceding six months when she began her Semester in San Francisco in January 2020. She switched out of a group project in order to take an age-old problem in women’s fashion.
“I thought of all the times when I would go out and have to compromise my high heels for a more practical option that didn’t go with my outfit,” Whittle told the Innovator Award judges in a speech last month. “I learned that although others had made similar products, no one had made a super great shoe of this kind. Creating a product like this is a really challenging optimization problem that would require an engineer who could design for structure and functionality, while keeping visual aesthetics at the forefront.”
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“Creating a product like this is a really challenging optimization problem,” says Whittle, who is putting her engineering degree to good use. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Whittle says she was inspired by the creative environment in San Francisco.
“The professors are just amazing—they’re all career entrepreneurs so they know what they’re talking about,” Whittle says. “San Francisco is a very entrepreneurial-spirited place, and the students I was in class with also had that spirit.”
Whittle is representative of the women who are being discovered and empowered by the Innovator Awards, says Diane MacGillivray, Northeastern’s senior vice president for university advancement, who created Women Who Empower with trustee and chair emeritus Henry Nasella to invest in women with entrepreneurial aspirations.
“Gabbie is an engineer who was feeling a lack of direction when she did the semester of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley,” MacGillivray says. “And that’s where she discovered herself as an entrepreneur. It’s the classic entrepreneurial thing: You identify a problem and say, ‘I have a solution to this.’”
Read full story at Northeastern Global News