Saie, beyond gaining cult popularity and surpassing $100 million in product sales, has implemented many climate commitments into its business, including plastic reduction and responsibly sourced packaging.

In her acceptance speech for the honor, Crowell stressed the importance of taking action. “I’m an entrepreneur. And entrepreneurs have a particular kind of superpower: we can take a teeny-tiny idea, believe it becomes something, and move it forward, until it’s bigger than we ever imagined,” she said. “We built Saie around that belief, and it has grown into a global powerhouse. But my instinct to take action didn’t start in beauty—and it doesn’t end there.”

She recalls picking up litter on trails when, as a child, she went hiking with her family. Now she’s taking those small lessons on leaving places better than she found them and applying them to making a difference in the massive beauty industry, which she said creates an estimated 120 billion units of plastic packaging waste every year.

Since Saie started in 2019, Crowell’s company has committed one percent of sales to environmental causes and partnered with rePurpose Global to collect twice as much plastic as they produce. Over five years, Crowell said Saie has recovered 200,000 pounds of waste.

While her contributions sometimes seemed small in the face of the staggering amount of new waste generated daily, Crowell realized that she didn’t have to do this alone. In 2025, Saie launched Planet Beautiful with Sephora and rePurpose Global, funding the recovery of more than 1 million pounds of plastic waste from nature in its first year. The number of brands that are joining have only been growing, she says, turning into greater amounts of waste collected.

“In climate, we talk a lot about the enormity of the problem—and we should. But we also need to talk about the power of beginning. That is how individual action becomes a collective movement,” Crowell said. “My goal is for Saie to help recover 100 million pounds of plastic waste from nature. And I hope that one day soon, even that number feels small.”